Class Book. Gop}'rightN?. copvRicirr deposh^ .y ^o ^uy^ lO OEHSTT^. ^ TRi -WEEKLY ?uBLIC9kTlor/ of TKE BB^T 00^1^^ t^2TA^pAf^UTE,F^T^R^ Vul. 8. No. 407. July IT, 1884. Annual Sub»cri|>(Ion, $30.1 English Men of Letters, Edited by John Moriej ■/ / i neat CLOTH BINDING for this volume can be obtained from any bookseller or newsdealer, price 15cts LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 1. Hyperion 20 2. Outre-Mer ^ 20 3., The Happy Boy 10 4. Arae lo 5. Frankenstein 10 6. TheLastof theMohicans.2o 7. Clytie 20 8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 9. The Moonstone, Part 11,10 10. Oliver Twist 20 11. The Coming Race 10 12. Leila 10 13. The Three Spaniards.. .20 14. The Tricks of the Greeks.20 15. L' Abbe Constantin 20 16. Freckles 20 17. The Dark Colleen 20 18. They were Married .... 10 19. Seekers After God 20 20. The Spanish Nun 10 21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 22. Fleurette 20 23. Second Thoughts 20 24. The New Magdalen 20 25. Divorce 20 26. Life of Washington 20 27. Social Etiquette 15 28. Single Heart, Double Face 10 29. Irene; or, The Lonely Manor 20 30. Vice Versa 20 3 1 . Ernest Maltravers 20 32. The Haunted House... 10 33. John Halifax ..20 34. 800 Leagues on the , Amazon 10 35. The Cryptogram 10 36. Life of Marion 20 37. Paul and Virginia 10 38. A Tale of Two Cities. ... 20 39. The Hermits 20 40. An Adventure in Thule, etc 10 41. A Marriage in High Life2o 42. Robin 20 43. Two on a Tower 20 44. Rasselas 10 45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- nest Maltravers 20 46. Duke of Kandos 20 47. Baron Munchausen 10 48. A Princ'ss of Thule .... 20 49. The Secret Despatch — 20 50. Early Days of Christian- ity, 2 Parts, each 20 51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 52. Progress and Poverty... 20 53. The Spy 20 54. East Lynne 20 55. A Strange Story 20 56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 Adam Bede, Part II 15 57. The Golden Shaft 20 58. Portia 20 59. Last Days of Pompeii. . .20 60. The Two Duchesses 20 61. TomBrown'sSchoolDays.20 62. Wooing O't, 2 Pts. each. 15 63. The Vendetta 20 64. Hypatia, Part 1 15 Hypatia^ Part II 15 6s. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70, 71- 72. 73. 74' 75. 76. 77. 78. 79- 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93- 94. 95- 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. lOI. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. no. Selma 15 Margaret and her Brides- » laids 20 Horse Shoe Robinson, 2 Parts, each 15 Gulliver's Travels 20 Amos Barton 10 The Berber 20 Silas Marner 10 Queen of the County . . .20 Life of Cromwell 15 Jane Eyre 20 Child'sHist'ry of Engrd.20 Molly Bawn 20 Pillone 15 Phyllis. 20 Romola, Part 1 15 Romola, Part II 15 Science in ShortChapters.20 Zanoni 20 A Daughter of Heth 20 Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible 20 Night andMoming,Pt.I.i5 NightandMorning,Pt.II 15 Shandon Bells 20 Monica 10 Heart and Science. .... .20 The Golden Calf 20 The Dean's Daughter.. .20 Mrs. Geoffrey 20 Pickwick Papers, Part 1 . 20 Pickwick Papers.Part II. 20 Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 Macleod of Dare 20 Tempest Tossed, Part I . ao Tempest Tossed^ P't II. 20 Letters from High Lat- itudes 20 Gideon Fleyce 20 India and Ceylon 20 The Gypsy Queen 20 The Admiral's Ward 20 Nimport, 2 Parts, each.. 15 Harry Holbrooke. • 20 Tritons, 2 Parts, each . . 15 Let Nothing You Dismay, lo Lady Audley's Secret ... 20 Woman's Pla«e To-day. 20 Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 Housekeeping and Home making 15 No New Thing 20 TheSpoopendykePapers.2o False Hopes 15 Labor and Capital 20 Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 More Words about Bible. 20 Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1. 20 Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1. 20 An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 The Lerouge Case 20 Paul Clifford 20 A New Lease of Life ... 20 Bourbon Lilies 20 Other People's Money.. 20 Lady of Lyons 10 Ameline de Bourg 15 A Sea Queen 20 The Ladies Lindores. ..20 Haunted Hearts 10 Loys, Lord Beresford...20 127. Under Two Flags, Pt I. i Under Two Flags, Pt II.: 128. Money i 129. In Peril of His Life 2 130. India; What can it teach us? ; 131. Jets and Flashes j 132. Moonshine and Margue- rites . 133. Mr. Scarborough's Family, 2 Parts, each . . 15 134. Arden 15 135. Tower of Percemont. . . .20 136. Yolande 2a 137. Cruel London 20 138. The Gilded Clique 20 139. Pike County Folks 20 140. Cricket on the Hearth . 10 141. Henry Esmond. .20 142. Strange Adventure' ;* a '/ Phaeton -..2* 143. Denis Duval f io\ 144. OldCur 3i.jShop,P't I.15 01dCuTiosityShop,P'rt II. 15 145. Ivanhoe, Part 1 15 Ivanhoe, Part II 15 146. White Wings 20 147. The Sketch Book 20 148. Catherine id 149. Janet's Repentance 10 150. Bamaby Rudge, Part I..15 Barnaby Rudge, Part II. 15 151. Felix Holt 20 152. Richelieu 10 153. Sunrise, Part 1 15 153. Sunrise, Part II 15 154. Tour of the World in 80 Days 20 155. Mystery of Orcival 20 156. Lovel, the Widower 10 157. Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid 10 158. David Copperfield, Part 1.20 DavidCopperfield.P'rt II. 20 159. Charlotte Temple 10 160. Rienzi, 2 Parts, each ... 15 161. Promise of Marriage .... 10 162. Faith and Unfaith 20 163. The Happy Man 10 164. Barry Lyndon 20 165. Eyre's Acquittal 10 166. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 20 167. Anti-Slavery Days 20 168. Beauty's Daughters 20 169. Beyond the Sunrise 2 170. Hard Times 2 171. Tom Cringle's Log 7 172. Vanity Fair ;. i73« Underground Russia : 174. Middlemarch,2 Pts each.; 175. Sir Tom : 176. Pelham ■> 177. The Story of Ida 178. Madcap Violet ? 179. The Little Pilgrim .' i8a Kilmeny : 181. Whist, or Bumblepuppy?.! 182. That Beautiful Wretch.. r 183. Her Mother's Sin - 184. Green Pastures, etc i8s, Mysterious Island, P* SECRET \^ OF gEAUTY. How to Beautify the Complexion. All women kii'ow that it is beauty, rather than genius, which all generations of men have worshipped in the sex Can it be wondered at, then, that so much of woman's time and attention ^hould be directed to the means of developing and preserving: that beauty! The most important adjunct to beauty is a clear, Pinooth, soft and beautiful skin With this essential a lady appears handsome, even if her features are not perfect. Ladies atflicted with Tan. Freckles, Rough or Discolored Skin, should lose vo time in procuring and applying I1A.IRD S BLOOM OF YOUTH. It will immediately obliterate all such imperfections, and is entirely harm- less. It has been chemically analyzed by the Board of Health of New York City, and pronounced entirely free from any material injurious to the health or pkin. Over two million ladies have U'-ed this delightful toilet preparation and in everyinstance it has given entire satisfaction. Ladies, if you desire to be beauti- ful, give T>AIRD'S BLOOM OP YOUTH a trial, and be convinced of its won- derful efficacy. Sold by Fancy Goods Dealers and Druggists everywhere. Price, T5c, per Bottle. Depot, 83 Jolin St., N, Y. FAIR FACES, And fair, in the literal and most pleasing sense, are those kept fresh and pure by the use of BUCHAN'S CARBOLIC TOILET SOAP This article, which for the past fifteen years has had 1 he commendation of every lady who uses it, is made from the best oils, combined with just the proper amount of glycerine and chemically pure carbolic acirl, and is the realization of a PER- FECT SOAP. It will positively keep the skin fresh, clear, and white; removing tan, freckles and discolorations from the skin; healing all eruptions; prevent chap- ping or roughness ; allay irritation and soreness ; and overcome all unoleasant effects from perspiration. Is pleasantly perfumed ; and neither when using or afterwards Is the slight- est odor of the acid perceptible. BUCHAN'S CARBOLIC DENTAL SOAP Ot^kaxc ctt'i T^^eeerves the teeth; cools and refreshes the mouth; sweetens the brea'h nod i- ''very way an unrivalled dental preparation. Br-HA^'S CARROIilC MMJICINAL SOAP cures all Er'iptj MS and bkin Diseases. f NOTE. The present writer published a study on Burke some twelve years ago. It was almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative. 'I'he volume now submitted to the readers of this Series is biographical rather than critical, and not more than about a score of pages have been reproduced in it from the earlier book. Three pages (pp. 211-213) have been in- serted from an article on Burke contributed by me to the new edition of the Eiuyclopadia Britannica ; and I have to thank Messrs. Black for the great courtesy with which they have allowed me to transcribe the passage here. These borrowings from my former self, the reader will perhaps be willing to excuse, on the old (}reek principle, that a man may once say a thing as he would have it said, h\T>^ and it is possible that we may set it down in one or the other vear as we choose to reckon by the old or the new style. The best opinion is that he was born at Dublin on the 12th of January. 1729 (N.S.). His father was a sohcitor in good practice, and is believed to have been descended from some Bourkes of county Limerick, who held a respectable local position in the time of the civil wars. Burke's mother belonged to the Nagle family, which had a strong connexion in the county of Cork ; they had been among the last BURKE. J J adherents of James II., and they remained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke remained true to the church of her ancestors, and her only daufiiror poeticusP This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the son of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those close friendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills an energetic manhood. Many tears were shed when the two boys parted at Ballitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence. They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of those who never heard the saving name of Christ. They send one another copies of verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton's judgment on an invocation of his new poem, to beau- teous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned by Shackleton to endea- vour to live according to the rules of the Gospel, and he humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea that in a town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously : it is easier, he says, to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country, than at Trinity College, Dublin. In the region of profaner tilings the two friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully's Epistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, a fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral and political, neither very trite nor obvious, nor out of the way and abstract, and this is the true beauty of historical observation. Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend passes the day, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in humbler prose that Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth into the country through fragrant gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast drove him back unwillingly to the town, where amid lectures and books his heart incessantly turned to the river and the fir woods of Ballitore. In the evening he again turned his back on the city, taking his way "where Liffey rolls her dead dogs to the sea," along to the wall on the shore, whence he delighted to see the sun sink into the waters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. Alas, it was beneath the dignity of verse to tell us what we should most gladly have known. For, " The muse nor can, nor will declare, What is my work, and what my studies there." What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his under- standing, we cannot learn from any other source. He describes himself as spending three hours almost every day in the public library. " The best way in the world," he adds oddly enough, "of killing thought." I have read some history, he says, and among other pieces of history, " I am endeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poor country " — a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetual mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of the eminent Irishmen BURKE. X3 whose names adorn the annals of Trinity College in tlie eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of IVakcJichi. There is no evidence that at this time he and Gold- smith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to Ox- ford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke mentions in his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty Swift died in 1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same year came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those who had taken part in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to the partisans of lost historic causes. Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother had a dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I never found so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before. Burke's f itlier is said to have been a man of angry and irritable temper, and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. In 1747 Burke's name had been entered at tiie Middle Temple, and after tak'ng his degree, he prepared to go to England to pursue the ordinary course of a lawyer's studies. He arrived in London in the early part of 1750. A period of nine years followed, In which the circumstances of Burke's life are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity. He seems to have kept his terms in the regular way at the Temple, and from the mastery of legal principles and methods which he afterwards showed in some important transactions, we might infer that he did more to qualify himself for practice than merely dine in the hall of his Inn. For law, alike as a profession and an in- strument of mental discipline, he had always the profound respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw that it was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he said, in his fine description of George Grenville, in words that all who think about schemes of education ought to ponder, " is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences : a science which does more to quicken a7id invigorate the nnderstanding than all the other kinds of learjiing put together ; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in the same proportion."* Burke was never called to the bar, and the circum- stance that, about the time when he oiight to have been looking for his first guinea, he published a couple of books which had as little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a tolerably sure sign that he had followed the same desultory courses at the Tem- ple as lie had followed at Trinity College. We have only to tell over a^cain a very old story. The vague attractions of literature prevailed over, the duty of taking up a serious profession. His father, who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant, and at last he withdrew his son's allowance, or else reduced it so low that the *■ A ntericmi Taxation. 14 BURKE. recipient could not possibl}- live upon it. This catastrophe took place some time in 1755 — a year of note in the history of literature, as the date of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary. It was upon literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hundreds of smaller men before and since, now threw himself for a livelihood. Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was not fond in after-life of talking about liis earlier days, not because he had any false shame about the straits and iiard shifts of youth- ful neediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inborn stateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on the less dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embar- rassments in his existence, if he had been capable of letting the detail of the day lie more heavily upon him. So far as it goes, how- ever, it is a sign of mental health that a man should be able to cast behind him the barren memories of bye-gone squalor. We maybe sure that whatever were the external ordeals of his apprenticeship in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke never failed in keeping for his constant companions generous ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to have frequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent Garden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre. He was much of a wan- derer, partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak. In after-life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing the strain of prolonged application to books and papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with the distracting com- bination of active business among men. At the date of which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Mon- mouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in retired coun- try villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in ccmpany with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It would be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. We are practically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son in after-years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which is pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own knowledge. '■''Reading.,'''' he says, '•'■ aiid jnuch reading is good. B7it the power of dive?'sifying the matter in yonr own 7nijid, ajid of ap- plying it toe7'ery occasion that arises, is far better .; so don'' t suppress the vivida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than obscure and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then at the age when character usually either fritters itself away,or grows strong on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations. Writ- ing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to have con- tinued from months to years. " I have broken all rules ; I have neglected all decorums ; everything except that I have never forgot a friend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and love him. What appearance there may have been of neglect, ni'RKE. arises from my m-nner nf life: chequered with various desivas fully stirred. In England the essay has been prdinarily slighted; it has perhaps been overshadowed by its au- thor's fame in vi^eightier matters. The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of disj)aran;cmcnt, and in truth it has none of thcn;i-::i v •!" ri > '-•- r-;-] ic;' ; :i. :ti.;:: \\.:^q ti h - \ 'J.ua-x' BURKE. xg and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Les- sing, the author of Laokoon (1766), by far the most definitely valu- able of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them. Lessing was so struck with the Inquiry that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence be- tween him and Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke liad raised, contains the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laokoon afterwards made so famous. Its influence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German historian of the literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted epithe'; of epoch-making. The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side of tin* eigliteenth century when Burke tells us that a tliirst for Variety ma architecture is sure to leave very little true taste ; or that an air \jii robustness and strengtli is very prejudicial to beauty ; or that sad fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sec- tions, again, are litde more than expanded definitions from the die tionary. Any tiro may now be shocked at such a proposition aa that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system. But at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry. It was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, which Addison had not long before timidly illustrated, that critics of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as they limit their search to poems, pictures, engrav- ings, statues, and buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and faculties in man to which art makes its appeal. Addison's treatment was slight, and merely literary ; Burke dealt boldly vvith his subject on the base of the most scientific psychology that was then within his reach. To approach it on the psychological side at all, was to make a distinct and remarkable advance in the method of the inquiry which he had taken in hand. 20 aUKKE. CHAPTER II. IN irel/.::d -parliament — beaconspield. Burke was thirty years old before be approaclied ev^en the threshold of the arena in which he was destined to I'C so great a figure. He had made a mark in hterature, and it was to literature rather than to public affairs that his ambition turned. He had naturally l^-ecome acquainted with the brother authors who haunted the coffee-houses in Fleet Street ; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, was one of the first memlers of the immortal club where Johnson did conversational battle with all comers. We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on Burke's friendships with the followers of his first profession, and on the active syinpathy with which he helped those/who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, the fragments that remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable con- tributions. His Hints for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought of Diderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an Account of the European Settlements in America. His Abridg- vieni of the History of England comes down no further than to the reign of John. A much uK^e important undertaking than his history of the past, was his design for a yearly chronicle of the present. The Annual Register began to appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for his survey of the great events which were then passing in the world. The scheme was probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this was the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of arms was henrd in every quarter of the globe, and in East and West new lands were being brought under the dominion of Great Britain. In this^ exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to be acquainted with public men. In 1759 ^^^ was introduced, probably by Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only sur- vives in our memories by his nickname of Single-speech. As a matter of fact, he made many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but none so good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and were all outshone by the new luminary. But the new luminary never shone again with its first brilliance. He sought Burke out BURKE. 21 on the strength of the success of the Vindication of Aaijiral Society, and he seems to have had a taste forgood company. Horace Walpole describes a dinner at his house in the summer of i 761. " There were Garrick," he says, " and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord BoHngbroke, that is much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. Ha will know i)etter one of these days." The prophecy came true in time, but it was Burke's passion for authorism that eventually led to a rupture with his tirst jxitron. Hamilton was a man of ability, but selfish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described him compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile. In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, and Burke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity. "The absenteeism of her men of genius," an eminent historian has said, " was a worse wrong to Ireland that the absenteeism of her land- lords. If Edmund Burke had remained in the country where Providence had placed him, he might have changed the current of its history." * It is at least to be said that Burke was ""ever so absorbed in other affairs, as to forget the peculiar interests of his native land. We have his own word, and his career does not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled on being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and up])ermost in his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the ].')lace of his birth and education ; and to the last he had in it " a dearness of instinct more than he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs of Ireland had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likely to find for describing in a few words what were the issues. The brief space can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer, for Ireland has furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of English statesmen. Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England just what the American colonies would have been, if they had contained, besides the European settlers, more than twice their number of unenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great rebellion of Tyrconncl by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal Laws against the CatJiolics were enacted and en- forced, and the grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness and completeness. The Protestants and landlords were supreme : the peasants and the Catholics were prostrate in despair. The Revolution brouoht about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England. Here it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of a small sect. There it made a small sect supreme over the body of the nation. "It was, to say the truth,-' Burke wrote, " not a revolution but . conquest," and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and normal system * Froude'- Ireland, ii. 214. 2 2 BURKE. of government. The last conquest of England was in the eleventh century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of the seventeenth. Sixty years after these events, when Burke revisited Ireland, some important changes had taken place. The Enghsh settlers of the beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They had become Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still furtlier west had formed a colonial interest and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on the part of the mother country promoted the growth of these hostile interests in both cases. The commercial policy pur- sued by England towards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. The industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was re- stricted, their commerce and even tlieir production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit Roma AlbcE minis. "The bulk of the peo- ple," said Stone, the Primate, " are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed ; and those things which in England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents, and we- can, and in many places do, subsist without them." On the other hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery under the exac- tions of landlords and a church which tried to spread Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to White- l oyism — terrible spectre, which, under various names and with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time. Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims of the colonial and commercial system ; the Catholic land-owners legally dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws ; the Catho- lic peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit; and the imperial government standing very much aloof, and leaving the country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly dis- contented with the mother country ; and the Catholic native Irish Kvere regarded by their Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense contempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their American counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the Red Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant was as odious as the first, and as terrible as the second. Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that the various descriptions of the people were kept as much apart, as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talked to a Roman Catho- lic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to a gardener's workman, or some other labourer of the second or third order, while a little time before this they were so averse to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, a thoroughly im- partial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor people in Ire- land were used worse than negroes by their masters and the mid- dlemen. We should never forget that in the transactions with the BURKE. 23 English government during the eighteenth century, the people con- cerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists of 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, not founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and for- uuie, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices — distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed. The directions in which Irish imi;)rovement \\ould move, were clear from the middle of the century to men with much less fore- sight than Burke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, either by Independence or Union, on the one hand ; and the grad- ual emanci riiion of the Catholics, on the other : were the two pro- cesses 10 wiiich every consideration of good government manifestly ])ointed. The first proved a much shorter and simp'er process than the second. To the first the oiily obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the English merchants. The second had to over- come the virulent opposition of the tyrannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgraceful but deep-rooted antipathies of the English naiion. The history of the relation between the mother country and her dependency during Burke's life, may be character- ised as a commercial and le,<:i:islative struggle between the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, drew support from the Catholic majority. A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of disorder and violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland. It suited the interests of faction to represent these commotions as the symptoms of a deliberate rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carrying on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and sometimes with France ; they were accused of re- ceiving money and arms from their foreign- sympathisers, and of aiming at throwing off the English rule. Burke says that he had means and the desire of informing himself to the bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the conclusion that this was not a true view of what had happened. What had happened was due, he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitous circum- stances. He consequently did not shrink from describing it as criminal, that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and that numbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, im- prisoned, tried, -"■'d capitally executed for a rebellion which was no rebellion at all. The episode is only important as illustrating the strong a- ' manly temper i:i which Burke, unlike too many of his countryme-^ with rtunco to make by English favour, uniformly considered th circumstanceo of hir. country. It was not until a later time th he had an opportunity of acting conspic' uously on h':r behalf, but whatever influence h^ ca: ^ to acquir with hir. party was unflinching'^ used against the cruel of English prejudice. 24 BURKE. Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years* (i 761-3.) In 1763 Hamilton, who had found him an in valuable auxiliary, procured for him, principally with the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of three hundred pounds a year from the Irish Treasury. In thanking him for his service, ^Burke proceeded to bargain that the obligation should not bind him to give to his patron the whole of his time. He insisted on being left with a discreet liberty to continue a little work which he had as a rent- charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he had acquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and he could only hope for a continuance of such advantages on condition of doing something to keep the same reputation alive. What this literary design was we do not know with certainty. It is believed to have been a history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment re- mains. Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton, With an irrational stubbornness that may well astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus wishes to con- fine to paltry personal duties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and to the exclusion of other in- terests. "To rircumscribe my hopes," cried Burke, " to give up even the possi il ty of libeity, to annihilate myself for ever I " He threw up the ptniion, which he had held for two years, an. I declined all further connexion with Hamilton, whom he roundly described as an infamous scoundrel.. "Six of the best years of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literary reputation, or of im- provement of my fortune. ... In all this time you may easily conceive how rnuch I felt at seeing myself left behind by almost all of my contemporaries. There never was a season more favour- able for any man who chose to enter into the career of public life ; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own moral character, and my industry, my friends and connexions, when Mr. Hamilton first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior to those of several whose fortune is at this day upon a very differ- ent footing from mine." It was not long before a more important opening offered itself, which speedily brought Burke into the main stream of public life. In the summer of 1765 a change of ministry took place. It was the third since the king's accession five years' ago. First, Pitt had been disgraced, and the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then Bute came into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny and hate which his Scotch nationality, and the supposed source of his power over the king, had raised in every town in England. After Lord Bute, George Grenville undertook the Gov- ernment. Before he had been many months in office, he had sown the seeds of war in the colonies, wearied parliament, and disgusted the king. In June, 1765, Grenville was dismissed. With profound reluctance the king had no other choice than to summon Lord Rock- ingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy moment for himself and his party, was induced to offer Burke a post as his private secre- tary. A government by country gentlemen is too apt to be a gov- BURKE. 2" ernment of iijjnorance, and Lord Rockingham was without either experience or knowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the ad- vantage of having at his side a man wlio was chiefly known as an author in the service of Dodsley, and as having conducted the Annual Re^iste?' with great ability, but who even then was widely spoken of as nothing less than an encyclopaedia of political knowl- edge. It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to Lord Rockingham by William Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert was President of the Pjoard of Trade in the new government, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr. Johnson's famous example of the truth of the observation, that a man will please more upon the whole by negative qualities than by positive, because he was the most ac- ceptable man in London, and yet overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oI)lige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said. Besides Fitz- herbert's influence, we have it on Burke's own authority that his promotion was partly due to that mysterious person, William Burke, who was at the same time appointed an under-secretary of state. There must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the Burke connexion, and we shall presently consider what they were worth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke of New- castle hurried to the new premier, and told him the appointment would never do : that the new secretary was not only an Irish ad- venturer, which was true, but that he was an Irish papist, which was not true ; that he was a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer's, and that his real name was O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham behaved like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and re- peated to him what he had heard. Burke warmly denounced the truthlessness of the Duke's tattle : he insisted that the reports which his chief had heard would probably, even unknown to him- self, create in his mind such suspicions as would stand in the way of a thorough confidence. No earthly consideration, he said, should induce him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in him was not entire ; and he pressed his resignation. To this Lord Rockingham would not consent, and from that time until his death, seventeen years afterwards, the relations between them were those of loyal and honourable service on the one hand, and generous and appreciative friendship on the other. Six-and-twenty years afterwards (1791) Burke remembered the month in which he had first become connected with a man whose memory, he said, will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties, as long as the ideas of honour and virtue, jDublic and private, are understood and (herished in this nation. The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year and twenty days (1765-6). About the middle of this term (Dec. 26, 1765), Burke was returned to Parliament for the borough of Wen- dover, by the influence of Lord Verney, who owned it, and who also returned William Burke for another borough. Lord Verney 26 BURKE. was an Irish peer, with large property in Buckinghamshire; h« now represented that county in Parliament. It was William Burke's influence with Lord Verney tliat procured for his name- sake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first speech in the House of Commons a few days after the opening of the session of 1766 (Jan. 27), and was honoured by a compliment from Pitt, still the Great Commoner. A week later he spoke again on the same momentous theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and success was so marked that good judges predicted, in the stiff phraseology of the time, that he would soon add the palm of the orator to the laurel of the writer and the philosopher. The friendly Dr. Johnson wrote to Langton, that Burke had gained more repu- tation than any man at his first appearance had ever gained before. The session was a great triumph to the new member, but it brought neither strength nor popularity to the administration. At the end of it, the king dismissed them, and the Chatham government was formed ; that strange combination which has been made famous by Burke's description of it, as a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dove-tailed, such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tesselated pavem.ent without cement, that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke should not have joined the new ministry. The change was at first one of persons, rather than of principles or of measures. To put himself, as Burke afterwards said, out of the way of the negotiations which were then being carried on very eagerly and through many channels with the Earl of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change of ministry. He was free from party engagements, and more than this, he was free at the express desire of his friends ; for on the very day of his return, the Marquis of Rockingham wished him to accept office under the new system. Burke '• believes he might have had such a situation, but he cheerfully took his fate with his party." In a short time he rendered his party the first of a long series of splendid literary services by writing his Observations on the Present State of the Nation (1769). It was a reply to a pam- phlet by George Grenville, in which the disappointed minister accused his successors of ruining the country. Burke, in answer- ing the charge, showed a grasp of commercial and fiscal details at least equal to that of Grenville himself, then considered the first man of his time in dealing with the national trade and resources. To this easy mastery of the special facts of the discussion, Burke added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broad principles, and placing himself and his readers at the highest and most effective point of view for commanding their general bearings. If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies de- scribed, he might well have seized with impatience the opening to office that the recent exhibition of his powers in the House of Commons had now made accessible to him. There was not a man in Great Britain to wl-iom the emoluments of office would have been more useful, il io one cf ti.e ttfjuiin;;; r.-iy:,'c.ies iri I'ttrary Liog- BURKE. 27 rapliy, how Burke could think of entering Parh':iment without any means that anybody can now trace of earning a fittinfy livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not lonj^ ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent enough to pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, in order to enable him to study the pictures in the great European galleries, and to make a prolonged residence at Rome. A little later he took a step which makes t:he riddle still more difficult, and which has given abundant employment to wits who are inaximi in ;nini;uis, and think that every question which they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worth while to leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their own learning and dialectic. In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands krown as Gregories, in the parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the county of Bucks. It has often been asked, and naturally enough, how a man who, hardly more than a few months before, was still contented to earn an extra hundred pounds a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched out as the buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost upwards of twenty-two thousand pounds, which could not be kept up on less than two thousand five hundred a year, and of which the returns did not amount to one-fifth of that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what is perhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to entertain the idea of a design so ill-propor- tioned to anything that we cr.n now discern in his means and pros- pects ? The common answer from Burke's enemies, and even from some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover of this great man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged that he had plunged into furious gambling in East India stock. Tlie charge was current at the time, and it was speedily revived when Burke's abandonment of his party, after the French Revolution, exposed him to a thousand attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It has been stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own time, and none of the biographers have dealt with the perplexities of the matter as they ought to have done. Nobody, indeed, has ever pre- tended to find one jot or tittle of direct evidence that Burke him- self took a part in the gambling in India or other stocks. There is evidence that he was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what is undeniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, his intimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Vcrney, his po- litical patron, were all three at this time engaged together in im- mense transactions in East India stock; that in 1769 the stock fell violently; that they were unable to pay their differences ; and that in the very year in which Edmund Burke bought Gregories, they were utterly ruined, two of them beyond retrieval. Again it is clear that, after this, Richard Burke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West Indies ; that his clMini . were disputed by the Govern- ment as questionable and (^ish )nest ; and that he lost his case. Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the day, to be deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But there is no evidence. What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant taint of speculation 28 BURKE, and financial adveiitureship hung at one time about the whole con- nexion, and that the adventures invariably came to an unlucky end. Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were relations or not, and if so, in what degree they were relations, neither of them ever knew ; they believed that their fathers sometimes called one another cousins, and that was all that they had to say on the sub- ject. But they were as intimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to mend his broken fortunes in India, Edmund Burke commended him to Philip Francis — then fighting his deadly duel of tive years with Warren Hastings at Calcutta — as one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite since their boyish years. '' Look- ing back to the course of my life," he wrote in 1771, " I remember no one considerable benefit in the whole of it which I did not, mediately or immediately, derive from William Burke." There is nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this intimacy and the community of purse and home which subsisted among the three Burkes, in the theory that when Edmund Burke bought his property in Buckinghamshire, he looked for help from the specula- tions of Richard and William. However this may have been, from them no help came. Many years afterwards (1783), Lord Verney filed a bill in Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a sum of 6000/., which he alleged that he had lent at the instigation of Wil- liam Burke to assist in completing the purcliase of Beaconsfield. Burke's sworn answer denied all knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not get the relief for which he had prayed. In a letter to Shackleton (May r, 1768) Burke gave the follow- ing account of what he had done : — *' I have made a push," he nays, " with all I could collect of my own, and tlie aid of my friend.s, to Cast a little root in this country. I have purchased a house, with an estate of about six liundred acres of land, in Buckingham- shire, twenty-four miles from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant ; and I propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest. You who are classical will not be displeased to know that it was formerly the seat of Waller, the poet, whose house, or part of it, makes at present the farm-house within an hundred yards of rne." The details of the actual purchase of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price was twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen thousand were left on mortgage, which remained outstanding until the sale of tlie property by Mrs. Burke in 1812. Garret* Burke, tlie elder brother, had shortly be- fore the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and this bequest is rather conjecturally estimated at two thousand pounds. The l^alance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on Burk.-'s bond. The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and it still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain so handsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it likely that he would be able to maintain it. He coimted, no doubt, on making some sort of income by farming, but then he might well BUKKE. 29 have known that an absorbed politician would hardly be able, as he called it, to turn farmer in good earnest. For a short time he received a salary of seven hundred pounds a year as agent for New York. We may perhaps take for granted that he made as much more out of his acres. He received sometliingfrom Dodslcv for his work on the Annual Register down to 1788. But wiien all these resources have been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit. The unhappy truth is that from the mid- dle of 1769, when we find hini applying to Garrick for the loan of a thousand pounds, down 10 1794, when the king gave him a pension, lUirke was never free from the harassing strain of debts and want of money. It has been stated with good show cf authority, that his obli'^ations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than tliirtv thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (17^2), with a <.eneVosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been So richly earned by the faithful friend who was the Object of it, he left instructions to his executors that all Burke's bonds should be We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all this had been otherwise. But those who press it as a reproach against Burke's memory may be justly reminded that when Pitt died, after drawing the pay of a minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues— the noble mean of Ma^rnificence, standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar osfaitation and narrow pettiness. At least, every credi- tor wa% paid in good time, and nobody suffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable matters of supreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them and Burke's greatness are like the people— slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of o.d —who, vvhen they went to Olympia, could only perceive that they were scorched bv the sun, and pressed by the crowd, and deprived of comfortable nieans of bathing, and wetted by the rain and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome th^^gf , ^"^ ,«o t'ley almost forcrot the great colossus of ivory and gold Phidias s s atue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and winch stood m all Us dory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision. there have been few men in history with whom personal objects counted for so lutle as they counted with Burke. He if Ij ^^'^ what so many public men only feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with which he acted, and from those ot the wliole nation for which he held himself a trustee. WhU Wiliam Burke said o him in 1766 was true throughout his life-- Ned is full of real business, intent upou doing solid good to his country as much as if he was to receive twenty per cent, from the Empire. ^ Such me., as the shrewd and impudent Rigby atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious servility and drew more of the public money from the pay office in half-a-dozen quarter-days 30 BURKE. than Burke received in all bis life. It was not by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember all the untold bitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle fned to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new priva j secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), down to the W\\\t when the Duke of Bedford, himself bat- tening '• in grants to the house of RusseJ, S) enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger ^credibility," assailed the government forgiving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own dav^ '-• I was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, " like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legisla- tor; Nitor in adversujn\-~> the motto for a man like me. I pos- ses^sed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that rec'ommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life, for in every step was I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests l)oth abroad and at home • otherwise no rank, no toleration even for me," BURKE. 31 CHAPTER III. THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE, Foreign' observers of our affairs looked upon the state oi Eng- land between I...C accession of George III. and ; le loss of the American colonies (i 760-1 776), with mixed disgust and salisfaciion. Their instinct as absolute rulers was revolted by a spectacle of un- bridled faction and raging anarchy ; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness of a power which Chatham had so short a time before left at the highest point of grandeur and strength. Fred- erick the Great spoke with contempt of the insolence of Opposi- tion and the virulence of parties ; and vowed that, petty German prince as he was, he would not change places with the King of England. The Emperor Joseph pronounced positively *:hat Great Britain was declining, that Parliament was ruining itself, and that the colonies threatened a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought that nothing would restore its ancient vigour to the realm, short of the bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole suspected ihat the state of the country was more serious than it had been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to be approaching by fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men who remembered their Roman history, fancied that they saw every svmptom of confusion that preceded the ruin of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasily what was. the temper of the army. Men who remembered the story of the violence and insatiable factiousness of Florence, turned again to Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini. to trace a parallel between the fierce city on the Arno and the fierce city on the Thames. When the King of Sweden, in 1772. carried out a revolu- tion, by abolishing an oligarchic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with the assent of his people, there were act\ia11y serious men in England who thought that the English, after having been guilty of every meanness and corruption, would soon, like the Swedes, own themseh s unworthy to be free. The Duke of Rich- mond, who happened t' have a claim to a i')eerage and an estate in France, excused himself for taking so much ].')ains to establish his claim to them, by gravely askin*^ who knew that a time might not soon come when England would not be worthy living in, and when a retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free man to have ? 32 BURKE. The reign had begun by a furiou.s outbreak of hatred between the English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had been driven from office, not merely because he was supposed to owe his power to a scandalous friendship with the King's mother, but because he was accused of crowding the public service with his detested countrymen from the other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of his policy than from rude prejudice against his country. The flow of angry emotion had not subsided before the whisper of strife jn the American colonies began to trouble the air ; and before that had waxed loud, the Middlesex election had blown into a porten- tous hurricane. This was the first great constitutional case after Burke came into the House of Commons. As, moreover, it became a leading element in the crisis which was the occasion of Burke's first remarkable essay in the literature of politics, it is as well cOgo over the facts. The Parliament to which he had first been returned, now ap- proaching the expiry of its legal term, was dissolved in the spring of 1768. Wilkes, then an outlaw in Paris, returned to England, and announced himself as a candidate for the City. When the election was over, his name stood last on the poll. But his ancient fame as the opponent and victim of the court five years before were revived. After his rejection in the City, he found himself strong enough to stand for the county of Middlesex. Here he was returned at the head of the poll after an excited election. Wilkes had been tried in 1764, and found guilty by the King's Bench of republishing Number Yo\\.\-^\Q.oi\\\& North Briton, and of printing and publish- ing the Essay on Woman. He had not appeared to receive sentence, and had been outlawed in consequence. After his election for Middlesex, he obtained a reversal of his outlawry on the point of technical form. He then came up for sentence under the original verdict. The court sent him to prison for twenty-two months, and condemned him to pay a fine of a thousand pounds. Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the new Par- liament began. His case came before the House in November, 1768, on his own petition, accusing Lord Mansfield of altering the record at his trial. After manv acrimonious debates and examina- tions of Wilkes and others at the bar of the House, at length, by 21Q votes ac:ainst 136. the famous motion was passed which ex- pelled him from the House. Another election for Middlesex was held, and Wilkes was returned without opposition. The day afttr the return, the House of Commons resolved, by an immense ma- jority, that, having been expelled, Wilkes was incapable of serving in that Parliament. The following month Wilkes was once more elected. The House once more declared the election void. In April another election took place, and this time the Government put forward Colonel Luttvel. who vacated his seat for Bossiney for the purpose of opposing: Wilkes. There was the same result, and for the fourth time Wilkes was at the head of the poll. The House ordered the return to be altered, and after hearing by counsel the freeholders of Middlesex who petitioned against the alteration. nUKKE. 33 fin )lly confirmed it (Mav 8, 1760) by a maiority of 221 to 152. Ac- coidincr to Lord Temple, this was the greatest majority ever known on the last dav of a session. The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceeding.'; need little interpretation. The House, according to the authorities, had a constitutional right to expel Wilkes, though the grounds on wliich even this is defended would probably be questioned if a imilar case were to arise in our own day. But a single branch of the l-fjislalure could have no power to pass an incapacitating vote eithc'- ag'iinst Wilkes or anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the least ii?strument by which such incapacitv couid be imposed. The House might perhaps expel Wilkes, but it' could not either legally, or with regard to the less definite limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middlesex freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore set aside their representative, who was then free from any disabling quality. Lord Camden did not much exaggerate, when he declared in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the Middlesex election had given the constitution a more dangerous wound than any which were given during the twelve years' absence of Parliament in the reign of Ciiarles L The House of Commons was usurping_ another form of that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the last of the Stuart sovereigns "had lost his crown. If the House by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, what legal or constitutional impediment would there be in the way, if the majority were at any time disposed to declare all their most formidable opponents in the minority incapable of sitting "? In the same I^ariiament, there was another and scarcely less remarkable case of Privilege, "that eldest son of Prerogative," as Burke truly called it, "and inheriting all the vices of its parent," Certain printers were accused of breach of privilege for reporting the debates of the House (March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms attempted to take one of them into custody in hia own shop in the City. A constable was standing by, designedly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the messenger into his custody for an assault. The case carne on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alderman Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the messengerof the House was committed. The City doctrine was, that if the House of Commons had a ser- jeant-at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace. If the House of Com- mons could send their -citizens to Newgate, they could send it.s messenger to the Compter. Two other printers were collusivtly arrested, brought before Wilkes and Olivei; and at once liberated. The Commons instantly resolved on stem rnr ures. The Lord Mayor and Oliver were taken and dispatched to the Tower, where they lay until die prorogation of Parliament. Wilkes stubbornly refused to pav any attention to repeated summon^e~ to attend at the bar of tne House, very properly insisting that heo-ight to be summoned to attend /// his place as Member for Micdlesex. Be- sides committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House 3 • ^ BURKE. summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with his books, and then and there forced liiin t tvike out the record of the recogni- sances into which their n, ^-r had entered on being committed at the Mansion House, 1 . mart ever did anything more abitrary an I illegal. The House deliberately intended' to constitute itself, as Ikirke had sa-d two years before, an arbitrary and despotic as- sembly. " The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. In this, the distem- pers of Parliament." Jiurke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 1771, warned the House of the evils of the course upon which they were entering, and declared those to be their mortal enemies who would persuade them to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at this time the majority of the House. It was to no purpose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law : it was not known., " you yourself not knowing upon what grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man : " and it was im'i fixed, because it was varied according to the occasion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could call for it as a right. A strain of unanswerable reasoning of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being unanswerable. Despotic /)r oligarchic pretensions are proof against the most iormidai)le battery that reason can experience can construct against them. And Wilkes's exclusion endured until this Parliament — the Unre- ported Parliament, as it was called, and in many resi:)ects the very worst that ever assembled at Westminster — was dissolved, and a new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned for Middlesex, and took his seat. The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, and the town had been harassed by disorder. Of the fierce l}rutality of the crowd of that age, we may form a vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of Hogarth. Barbarous laws were cruelly administered. The common people were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. Wilkes had written filthy verses, but the crowd cared no more for this than their betters cared about the vices of Lord Sandwich. They made common cause with one who was accident- ally a more conspicuous sufferer. Wilkes was quite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite. The masses were better than their leader. "Whenever the people have a feeling," Burke onse said, "they commonly are in the right: they sometimes mistake the phy- sician," Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that if George ^TL had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a good one, the latter '-"^ight have turned the former out of the kingdom ; for the turbulence that began in street riots at one time threatened to end in revolt. The King liimself was attacked with savage in- vective in papers of which it was said, that no one in the previous" BURKE. :.5 century would have dared to print any like them until Charles was fast locked up in Carisbrooke Castle. As is usual when the minds of tbo«;e in power have been infected witli an arbitrary temper, the empl()\ment of military force to crush civil disturlmnces became a familiar and favourite idea. The mili- tary, said Lord Weymouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed to the Surrey magistrates, can never be employed to a more con- stitutional purpose than in the support of the authority and dignity of the magistracy. If the magistrate should be menaced, he is cau- tioned not to delay a moment in calling for the military, and making use of them effectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards an affray occurred between the crowd and the troops, in which some twenty people were killed and wounded (May lo, 1768). On the following day, the Secretary of War, Lord Harrington, wrote to the command- ing officer, informing him that the King highly approved of the con- duct both of officers and men, and wished that his gracious appro- bation of them should be communicated to them. Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of tlie most lucid and able of his minor speeches. " If ever the time should come," he con- cluded, •' when this House shall be found prompt to execute and slow to inquire ; ready to punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to their grievances ; ready to grant supplies, and slow to examine the account ; ready to invnss't magistrates with large powers, and slow to inquire into the exercise of them ; ready to entertain notions of the military power as incorporated with the constitution — when you learn this in the air of St. James's, then the business is done ; then the House of Commons will change that character which it receives from the people only." It is hardly necessary to say that his motion for a committee was lost by the overwhelming majority of two hundred and forty-five against thirty. The general result of the proceedings of the government from the accession of George III. to the beginning of the troubles in the American colonies, was in Burke's own words, that the government was at once dreaded and contemned; that the laws were despoiled of all tlieir respected and salutary terrors ; that their inaction was a subject of ridicule, and their exertion of abhorrence ; that our de- pendencies had slackened in their affections ; that we knew neither how to yield nor how to enforce ; and that disconnection and con- fusion, in offices, in parties, in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed bayoncl the disorders of any former time. It was in the pamphlet on the Present Discontents, published in 1770. that Burke dealt at large with the whole scheme of policy of which all these irregularities were the distempered incidents. The pam]:)hlet was composed as a manifesto of the Rockingham section of tlie Whig party, to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different it was in spirit and composition from ''the Bedfords, the Grenvilles, and other knots, who are combined for no public pur- pose, but only as a means of furthering with joint strength their 36 BURKE. private and individual advantage." TIic pamplilet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the heads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inelegancies which they thought they found'in occa- sional passages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had ad- mitted insertions from other hands. Here for the first time he ex- hibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest quahties of his un- derstanding. Contemporaries had an opportunity of measuring this strength, by comparison with another performance of similar scope. The letters of Junius had startled the world the year before. Burke was universally suspected of being their author, and the suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There was no real ground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters were powerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnson admitted that he had never had a better reason for believing that Burke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the ability of Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind of the thought, at the instant that Burke voluntarily assured him that he neither wrote the lettersof Junius nor knew who had written them. The subjects and aim of those famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, but any one who in our time turns from the letters to the tract will wonder howtiie author of the one could ever have been suspected of writing the other. Junius is never more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as a railer. The author of the P7-esent Discontents speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke of Grafton; he only refers to persons, when theirconductor their situation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, lie probes, he reflects, he warns ; and as the result of this serious method, pursued by a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one of the monu- mental pieces of political literature. The last great pamphlet in the history of English jDublic affairs had been Swift's tract On the Conduct of the Allies (171 1), in which the writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pam- phlet is close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes ; but nobody need read it to-day, except tlie historical student, or a mem- ber of the Peace Society, in searcli of the most convincing ex- posure of the most insane of Englisli wars.* There is not a sen- tence in it which does not belong exclusively to the matter in hand : not a line of that general wisdom which is for all time. In the Present Discontents the method is just the opposite of this. The details are slurred, and they are not hteral. Burke describes with excess of elaboration how the new system is a system of double cabinets ; one put forward with nominal powers in Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne, and secretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this is worked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of artificial rhetoric. But we lightly * This was not Burke's judgment on the long war against Louis XIV. See Regicidi Peace, i' BURKE. pass this over, on our way to more solid matter ; to the exposition of the prmciples of a constitution, the right methods of statesman- ship, and the defence of party. _ It was IJolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was think- ing, when he sat down to the composition of his tract The Pa- triot Kin^ was the fountain of the new doctrines, whiclivBurke trained his party to understand and to resist. If his foe was do- mestic, It was from a foreign armoury that Burke derived the instru- ments of resistance. The great fault of political writers is their too close adherence to the forms of the system of state which thev happen to be expounding or examining. They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not penetrate to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author in the middle of the eio tar as immediate events were concerned, Burke was nuick to discern their true interpretation. As has been already said he attributed to the King and his party a deliberateness of s sJe m which probably had no real existence in their minds. The Kin. in tended to reassert the old right of choosing his own m n st^^s Dose he began, "who think that the people are neve wmn° them andthri J/l): //. 1 say that in all disputes between faZuro/^^^^^ /^^ /-..«...//.... /. at least upon a par in Iroin.r further Whl ^'^>': ^^Pe'-'ence perhaps justifies him in TMnc? K. ^''f" P^P"'''^'' cliscontents are prevalent %on-,<,. 1^^:^!^^^''' 'Tt ''^"■■^^'" '''' col.stitut"i'ort.e luministration. I he people have no interest in disorder When aZf^ZlT^^ '' '' '^'''' ^'-'"^'""'^"^^ "«^^heir crime." And then he uTrZl ir"' ^""''^-^ ^'"^•^ ^'^e Memoirs of Sully which bo h t^ eir n'J'^^'^'?""^ '"^ ^""^'"'''^^ students should^'bk^^ a o o lu ons'thlf "^ ''''[' "'^°'^ *'^^ t'-^Wes of their hearts : "The rev- olutions that come to pass in great states are not the result of 38 BURKE. chance, nor of popular caprice. ... As for the populace, it is never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but from impatience of suffering." What really gives its distinction to the Present Discontents is not its plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for the superiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the pres- ence in it of the thought of Montesquieu and his school of the necessity of studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of government and law, but in relation to whole groups of social facts which give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable. Connected with this, is a particularly wide inter- pretation and a particularly impressive application of the maxims of expediency, because a wide conception of the various interact- ing elements of a society naturally extends the considerations which a balance of expediencies will include. Hence, in time, there came a strong and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his breadth of vision, his flexibilit),- of temper, his hardlv measurable influence. These are the principal thoughts in the Discontents to which that tract owes its permanent interest. " Whatever origi- nal energy," says Burke, in one place, " may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operation of both is in truth merely in- strumental. Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or superiors ; by a knowledge of their temper and by a judicious management of it .... The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency of the laws dependo upon them. Without them, your Common- wealth is no better than a scJienie upon paper j and not a liinng, active, effective constitntiony Thus early in his ]uiblic career had Burke seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured in the long and ever memoral)le episode of his war against the French Revolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements in politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by what he calls elsewhere in the present tract, the natural strength of the kingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of the poeple. When he spoke of the natural strength of the king- dom, he gave no narrow or conventional account of it. He in- cluded in the elements of that strength, besides the great peers and the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manu- facturers, and the substantial yeomanrv. Contrasted with the trite versions of government as fixed in King, Lords, and Commons, this search for the real organs of power was going to the root of the matter in a spirit at once thoroughly scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by the speculative training to which he had submitted himself in dealing with Bolingbroke, prepared his mind for a complete grasp of the^idea of the "body politic as a complex growth, a manifold whole, with closely interdependent relations BURKE. 35 among its several parts and divisions. It was this conception from which his conservatism sprang. Revolutionary politics have one of their sources in the idea that societies are capable of infinite and immediate modifications, without reference to the deep-rooted conditions that have worked themselves into every part of the social structure. The same opposition of the positive to the doctrinaire spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication of Party, which fills the last dozen paij^es of the pamphlet, and which is one of the most courageous of all Burke's deliverances. Party combination is exactiy one of those contrivances which, as it might seem, a wise man would accept for working purposes, but about which he would take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be some- thing revolting to the intellectual integrity and self-respect of the individual, in the systematic surrender of his personal action, inter- est, and power, to a political connexion in which his own judgment may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is like the surrender of the right of private judgment to the authority of the Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic doc- trine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare logical reason. But Burke cared nothing about the bare logical reason, until it had been clothed in convenience and custom, in the affections on one side, and experience on the other. Not content with insisting that for some special purpose of the hour, " when bad men combine, the good must associate," he contended boldly for the merits of fidelity to party combination in itself. Although Burke wrote these strong pages as a reply to Bolingbroke, who had denounced party as an evil, they remain as the best general apology that has ever been offered for that principle of public action, against more phil- osophic attacks than Bolingbroke's. Burke admitted that when he saw a man acting a desultory and disconnected part in public life with detriment to his fortune, he was ready to believe such a man to be in earnest, though not ready to believe him to be right. In any case he lamented to see rare and valuable qualities squandered away witht)ut any public utility. He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that people frequently acquired in party confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit. " But where duty ren- ders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situa- tion itself. It is surely no very rational account of a man that he has always acted right ; but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence. . . . When men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all prac- tised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts of business ; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common in- terest subsisting among them ; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy." In terms of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred reverence with which the Romans used to regard i\\t7iecessitudo sortis, or the 40 BURKE. relations that grew up between men who had only held office to- gether by the casual fortune of the lot. He pointed out to emula- tion the Whig junto who held so close together in the reign of Anne — Sunderland, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough — who believed "that no men could act with effect who did not act in con- cert ; that no men could act in concert who did not act with confi- dence ; and that no men could act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and com- mon interests." In reading these energetic passages we have to remember two things : first, that the writer assumes the direct object of party combination to be generous, great, and liberal causes ; and, second, that when the time c^rne, and when he be- lieved that his friends were espousing a wrong and pernicious cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the seven green witheS; broke away from the friendships of a life, and deliberately broke his party in pieces.* When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders of 1770, he insisted on contenting himself with what he ought to have known to be obviously inadequate prescriptions. And we cannot help feeling that he never speaks of the constitution of the government of this country without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he himself described and denounced, -as thinking better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserved. He was uniformly consistent in his view of the remedies which the various sections of Opposition proposed against the existing debase- ment and servility of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond wanted universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual par- liaments. Wilkes proposed to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to increase the county constituencies, and to give members to rich, populous, trading towns — a general policy which was accepted fifty- six years afterwards. The Constitutional Society desired frequent ]:)ar]iaments, the exclusion of placemen from the House, and the increase of the county representation. liurke uniformly refused to give his countenance to any proposals such as these, which involved a clearly organic change in the constitution. He confessed that he had no sort of reliance upon either a triennial parliament or a place-bill, and with that reasonableness which as a rule was fully as remarkable in him as his eloquence, he showed very good grounds for his want of faitli in the popular specifics. . In truth, triennial or annual parliaments could have done no good, unless the change had been accompanied by the more important process of amputating, as Chatham called it, the rotten boroughs. Of these the Crown could at that time reckon some seventy as its own prop- erty. Besides those which belonged to the Crown, there was also the immense number which belonged to the Peerage. If tlie King sought to strengthen an administration, the thing needful was not to enlist the services of able and distinguished men, but to conciliate a duke, who brought with him the control of a given * See on the same subject, Corresp. ii. 276-7. BURKE. 41 quantity of voting power in the Lower House. All this patrician intiuence, which may be found at the bottom of most of the intrigues of the period, would not have been touched by curtailing the duration of parliaments. What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to offer for these grave distempers of Parliament ? Only the remedy of the interposition of the body of the people itself. We must beware of interpreting this phrase in the modern democratic sense. In 1766 he had deliberately declared that he thought it would be more conformable to the spirit of the constitution, "by lessening the number, to add to the weight and independency of our voters.' '• Considering the immense and dangerous charge of elections, the prostitute and daring venality, the corruption of manners, the idle- ness and profligacy of the lower sort of voters, no prudent man would propose "to increase such an evil." * In another place he denies that the people have either enough of speculation in the closet, or of experience in business, to be competent judges, not of the detail of particular measures only, but of general schemes of policy.] On Burkes theory, the people, as a rule, were no more concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a man is concerned to interfere with somebody whom he has voluntarily and deliberately made his trustee. But here, he confessed, was a shameful and ruinous breach of trust. The ordinary rule of government was be- ing every day mischievously contemned and daringly set aside. Until the confidence thus outraged should be once more restored, then the people ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their representatives. That meetings of counties and corporations ought to settle standards for judging more systematically of the behaviour of those whom they had sent to Parliament. Frequent and correct lists of the voters in all im- portant questions ought to be procured. The severest discourage- ment ought to be given to the pernicious practice of affording a blind and undistinguished support to every administration. " Par- liamentary support comes and goes with office, totally regardless of the man or the merit." For instance, W^ilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the Middlesex election had been uniformly rejected, as often as it was made while Lord North was in power. Lord North had no sooner given way to the Rockingham Cabi net, than the House of Commons changed its mind, and the resolu- tions were expunged by a handsome majority of 115 to 47. Ad- ministration was omnipotent in the House, because it could be a man's most efficient friend at an election, and could most amply reward his fidelity afterwards. Against this system Burke called on the nation to set astern face. Root it up, he kept crying ; settle the general course in which you desire members to go; insist that they shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from this by the authority of the government of the day; let lists of votes be pub- lished, so that you may ascertain for yourselves whether your * Observatiotts on late State of the Nation^ Works, i. 105, b. t Speech on Duration 0/ Parliaments. 42 BURKE. trustees have been faithful or fraudulent ; do all this, and there will b4 no need to resort to those organic changes, those empirical innova tions, which may possibly cure, but are much more likely to de- stroy. It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have given deep displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of those whose only common bond was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the court, the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons. The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to Lord Rockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared must do much mischief to the common cause. But Burke's view of tlie constitution was a part of his be- lief with which he never paltered, and on which he surrendered his judgment to no man. " Our constitution," in his opinion, " stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other."* This image was ever before his mind. It occurs again in the last sen- tence of that great protest against all change and movement, when he describes himself as one who, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise. f When we think of the odious misgovernment in England which the constitution permitted, be- tween the time when Burke wrote and the passing of Lord Sid- mouth's Six Acts fifty years later, we may be inclined to class such a constitution among the most inadequate and mischievous political arrangements that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet "rt was this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial reverence. " Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into the ket- tle of any magician, in order to boil it with the puddle of their com- pounds into youth and vigour: on the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders ; 1 will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath." He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the arguments, which have always marked the champion of faith and authority against the impious assault of reason or innovation. The constitu- tion was sacred to him as the voice of the Church and the oracles of her saints are sacred to the fathful. Study it, he cried, until vou know how to admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, raiher believe that you are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed upon. We ought to understand it according to our meas- ure, and to venerate where we are not able presently to compre- hend. Well has Burke been called the Bossuet of politics. Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for the con- stitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, may now seem clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and his son, who were great men in the right, or to Beckford and Sawbridge, who were very * Presefit Disct>nte7its. t Reflection on the French Revolution. BURKE. 4^ little men in the right, we can only be just to him by comparing his itlcas with those wliich were dominant throughout an evil reign. While he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld the doctrine that *'to govern according to the sense, and agreeable to the interests, of the people is a great and glorious object of govern- ment." While he declared himself against the addition ofahun- dred knights of the shire, he in the very same breath protested that, though the people might be deceived in their choice of an object, he "■ could scarcely conceive any choice they could make, to be so very mischievous as the existence of any human force capable of resisting it." * To us this may seem very mild and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace in an age when Anglican divines— men like Archbishop Markham, Dr. Nowell, or Dr. Porteous — had revived the base precepts of passive obedience and non-resistance, and when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them. And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was writing farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy. It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vindication of the supremacy of popular interests over all other considerations would have been bootless toil, and that the great constitutional struggle from 1760 to 1783 would have ended otherwise than it did, but for the failure of the war against the insurgent colonies, and the final establishment of American Independence. It was this portentous transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, and which put an end to the hopes entertained by the sovereign of making his personal, will supreme in the Chambers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist victory in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. The struggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Middlesex, was continued at Boston in Massa- chusetts. The scene had changed, but the conflicting principles were the same. The war of Independence was virtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England ; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke's attitude in this great contest is that part of his history a(-)out the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute. * To the Chairman 0/ the ^ucRinghamshire Meeting, 1780. ^4 BURKE, CHAPTER IV. THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY — PARIS— ELECTION AT BRISTOL — THE AMERICAN WAR. The war with the American colonies was preceded by an inter- val of stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election was followed, as Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was succeeded by that of Lord North. The King had at last triumphed. He had secured an administration of which the fundamental principle was that the sovereign was to be the virtual head of it, and the real director of its counsels. Lord North's government lasted for twelve years, and its career is for ever associated with one of the most momentous chapters in the history of the English nation and of free institutions. Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. He had become important enough for the ministry to think it worth while to take pains to discredit him. They busily encouraged the report that he was Junius, or a close ally to Junius. This was one of the minor vex- ations of Burke's middle life. Even his friends continued to tor- ment him for incessant disclaimers. Burke's lofty pride made hira slow to deal positively with what he scorned as a malicious and unworthy imputation. To such a friend as Johnson he did not, as we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial, but Charles Townshend was forced to write more than one importunate letter before he could extract from Burke the definite sentence (Nov. 24, 1771): " I now give you my word and honour that I am not the author of Junius, and that I know not the author of that paper, and I do authorise you to say so." Nor was this the only kind of annoy- ance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled the can- dour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial good-nature, they admonished him that he did not bear instruction ; that he showed such arrogance as in a man of his condition was intoler- able ; that he snapped furiously at his parliamentary foes, like a wolf who had broken into the fold ; that his speeches were useless declamations ; and that he disgraced the House by the scurrilities of the bear-garden. These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke BURKE. 45 endured with the perfect self-command, not of the cold and in- different egotist, but of one who had trained himself not to ex- pect too much from men. Pie ix)ssessed the true solace for all l)rivate chagrins in the activity and the fervour of his public in- terests. In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company, and its relations with the Government, had fallen into disorder. The Opposition, though powerless in the Houses of Parliament, were often able to tlnvart the views of the ministry in the imperial board-room in Leadcnhall Street. The Duke of Richmond was as zealous and as active in his opposition to Lord North in the business of the East Indies as he was in the business of the country at West- minster. A proposal was made to Burke to go out to India at the head of a commission of three supervisors, with authority to ex. amine the concerns of every department, and full powers of control over the company's servants. Though this offer was pressed by tlie directors, Burke, after anxious consideration, declined it. What his reasons were, there is no evidence; we can only guess that he thought less of his personal interests than of those of the country and of his party. Without him the Rockingham connexion would undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most upright, consistent, and disinterested body of men then in public life. "You say," the Duke of Richmond wrote to him (Nov. 15, 1772), '•the party is an object of too much importance to go to pieces. Indeed, Burke, you have more merit than any man in keeping us together," It was the character of the party, almost as much as tlieir principles, that secured Burke's zeal and attachment; their decorum, their constancy, their aversion to all cabals for private ob- jects, their indifference to office, except as an instrument of power and a means of carrying out the policy of their convictions. They might easily have had office, if they would have come in upon the King's terms. A year after his fall from power. Lord Rockingham was summoned to the royal closet, and pressed to resume his post. But office at any price was not in their thoughts. They knew the penalties of their system, and they clung to it undeterred. Their patriotism was deliberate and considered, Chalcedon was called the city of the blind, because its founders wilfully neglected the more glorious site of Byzantium which lay under their eyes. "We have built our Chalcedon," said Burke, "with the chosen part of the universe full m our prospect." They had the faults to which an aristocratic party in op])osition is naturally liable. Burke used to reproach them with being somewhat languid, scrupulous, and unsystematic. He could not make the Duke of Richmond put ofi a large party at Goodwood for the sake of an important division in the House of Lords; and he did not always agree with Lord John Cavendish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quantity of fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But it was part of the steadfastness of his whole life to do his best with such materials as he could find ; he did not lose patience nor abate his effort, be- cause his friends would miss the opportunity of a great political 46 BURKE. stroke, rather than they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote their protests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for county meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with informa- tion, ideas, admonitions, and exhortations. Never before nor since has our country seen so extraordinary a union of the clever and indefatigable party-manager, with the reflective and philosophic habits of the speculative publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or democracy attractive than aristocracy ; yet we see how consistent with his deep moral conservatism was Burke's attachment to an aristocratic party, when we read his exhortation to the Duke of Richmond to remember that persons in his high station of life ought to have long views. " You people," he writes to the Duke (November 17, 1772). "of great families and heredi- tary trusts and fortunes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still >ve are but annual plants that perish with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation. The immediate power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham, is not so much of moment ; but if their conduct and example hand down their principles to their successors, then their houses become the public repositories and office of record for the constitution. . . . I do not look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from the genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if pos- sible — if not, the heads of certain families — should make it their business by the whole course of their lives, principally by their example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants, those principles which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed to posterity." Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described le5vs as reflection than as imagination — moral, historic, conservative imagi- nation — in which order, social continuity, and the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with tlie sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of ancestral force and quality, as in older days were long lines of Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profound instinct, in part pohtical, but in greater part moral. The accidental roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of his imagi- nation. With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a jour- BURKE 4^ ney to France. It was almost as though the solemn hicropluint of some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself amid tlie brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens. His only son had just fm- ished a successful school-course at Westminister, and was now entered a student at Christ Church. He was still too young for the university, and Burke thought that a year could not be more profitably spent than in forming his tongue to foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the house of the business agent of the Bishop of Auxerre. From the Bishop he received many kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after-years when the Bishop came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England. While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct liimself as to what was going on in French society. If he had not the flazzling reception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had ample opportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas fii the times, in more than one of the social camps into which Paris was then divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choi- seul that though he speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt that he would be infinitely agreeable if he could more easily make himself understood. He followed French well enough as a lis- tener, and went every day to the courts to hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame du Deffand showed him all pos- sible attention, and her friends eagerly seconded her. She invited him to supper parties where he met the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's secret diplomacy ; Caraccioli, successor of the nimble-witted Galiani as minister from Naples ; and other notabil- ities of the high world. He supped with the Duchess of Lux- embourg, and h.eard a reading of La Harpe's Bannecides. It was high treason in this circle to frequent the rival salon of Made- moiselle Lespinasse but either the law was relaxed in the case of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel. Here were for the moment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he saw some of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts. His eye was on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the sovereign problems of human government. A book, by a member of this circle, had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the town, and against which the government had taken the usual important measures of repression. This was the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The important part of the work was the in- troduction, in which the writer examined with what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and political causes of the decline of the military art in France. Burke read it with keen interest and energetic approval. He was present at the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's. To us, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, 48 BURKE. and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word. He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consuming intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page oni which they are written. It was, perhaps, at Mademoiselle Les- pinasse's that Burke met Diderot. The eleven volumes of th« illustrative plates of the Encyclopccdia had been given to the pul> lie twelve months before, and its editor was just released from the giant's toil of twenty years. Voltaire was in imperial exile at Fer- ney. Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the street which is now called after his name, but he had long ago cut himself off from society ; and Burke was not likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known in England seven years before, and against whom he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged and eccentric vanity. It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. They saw the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, before a crowd of princes of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all the miscel- laneous throng of a court. They attended mass in the chapel, where the old King, surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above that of Madame du Barri. The royal mistress astonished foreign- ers by hair without powder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and the most unassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's famous words, seemed to lose half its evil by losing all its grossness. And there, too, Burke had that vision to which we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our literature — Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, " decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning-star, full of lite and splendour and joy." The shadow was rapidly steal- ing on. The year after Burke's visit, the scene underwent a strange transformation. The King died ; the mistress was banished in luxurious exile ; and the dauphiness became the ill-starred Queen of France. Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene ; they awoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed, and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence has made immortal. Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so well received, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with the country. But it was not so. His spirit was per- turbed by what he had listened to. He came away with small es- teem for that busy fermentation of intellect in which his French friends most exulted, and for which they looked forward to the grati:ude and admiration of posterity. From the spot on which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It was from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers whom Burke so detested, that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human society which were so soon to find life in American Independence. It was from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a BURKE. 49 horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there was a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of stillness that precedes the hurricane. It was, indeed, the eve of a momentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American Republic had risen like a new constellation into the firmament, and the French monarchy, of such antiquity and f ♦ ne and high pre-eminence in European history, had been shattered to the dust. We may not agree with Burke's appreciation of the forces that were behind these vast convulsions. But at least he saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, that strong speculative forces were at work, which must violently prove the very bases of the great social superstructure, and might not improbably break them up for ever. Almost immediately after his return from France, he sounded a shrill note of warning. Some Methodists from Chatham had peti- tioned Parliament against a bill for the relief of Dissenters from subscription to the Articles. Burke denounced the intolerance of the petitioners. It is not the Dissenters, he cried, whom you have to fear, but the men who, " not contented with endeavouring to turn your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which life and immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the Gospel, would even extinguish that faint glimmering of Nature, that only comfort supplied to ignorant man before this great illumination. . . These are the people against whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law ; these are the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government, I would say, 'You shall not degrade us into brutes.' . . , The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism. . . .The infidels are outlaws of the constitution, not of this country, but of tlie human race. They are never, never to be supported, never to be tolerated. Under the systematic attacks of these people, I see some of the props of good government already begin to fail ; I see propagated principles which will not leave to religion even a toleration. I see myself sinking every day under the attacks of these wretched people."* To this pitch he had been excited by the vehement band of men, who had inscribed on their standard Ecraser Vlnfaine. The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was dissolved suddenly and without warning (October, 1774). The attitude of America was threatening, and it was believed the Ministers were anxious to have the elections over before the state of things be- came worse. The whole kingdom was instantly in a ferment. Couriers, chaises, post-horses turried in every direction over the island, and it was noted, as a measure of the agitation, that no fewer than sixty messengers passed through a single turnpike on one day. Sensible observers were glad to think" that, in conse- quence of the rapidity of the elections, less wine and money would be wasted than at any election for sixty years past. Burke had a • speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 1773. ^o BURKE. houseful of company at Beaconsfield when the news arrived. John* son was among them, and as the party was hastily breaking up, the old Tory took his Whig friend kindly by the hand : " Farewell, my dear sir," he said, " and remember that I wish you all the sue cess that ought to be wished to you, and can possibly be wished to you, by an honest man." The words were of good omen. Burke was now rewarded by the discovery that his labours had earned for him recognition and gratitude beyond the narrow limits of a rather exclusive party. He had before this attracted the attention of the mercantile public. The Company of Merchants trading to Africa voted him their thanks for his share in supporting their estabhshments. The Com- mittee of Trade at Manchester formally returned him their grate- ful acknowledgments for the active part that he had taken in the business of the Jamaica free ports. But then Manchester returned no representative to Parhament. In two Parliaments Burke had been elected for Wendover free of expense. Lord Verney's cir- cumstances were now so embarrassed, that he was obliged to part with the four seats at his disposal to men who could pay for them. There had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster, and Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the support of the popular party. But the patriot's memory was treacherous, and he speedily forgot, for reasons of his own, an idea that had origi- nated with himself. Burke's constancy of spirit was momentarily overclouded. "Sometimes when I am alone," he wrote to Lord Rockingham (September 15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I fall into a melancholy which is inexpressible, and to which, if I gave way, I should not continue long under it, but must totally sink. Yet I do assure you that partly, and indeed principally, by the force of natural good spirits, and partly by a strong sense of what I ought to do, I bear up so well that no one who did not know them could easily discover the state of my mind or my circum- stances. I have those that are dear to me, for whom I must live as long as God pleases, and in what way he pleases. Whether I ought not totally to abandon this public station for which I am so unfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know not." But he was always saved from rash retirement from public business by two reflections. He doubted wh.ether a man has a right to retire after he has once gone a certain length in these things. And he remembered that there are often obscure vexations in the most private life, which as effectually destroy a man's peace as anything that can occur in public contentions. Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of Burke at Malton, one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, and thither Burke in no high spirits betook himself. On his way to the north he heard that he had been nominated for Bristol, but the nomination had, for certain electioneering reasons, not been approved by the party. As it happened, Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton than, owing to an unexpected turn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of proposing him for a candidate revived. Messengers were sent BUR 511 express to his house in London, and, not finding him there, they hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quickly resolved that the offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol was the capital of the west, and it was still in wealth, population, and mercantile ac- tivity tlie second city of the kingdom. To be invited to stand for so great a constituency, without any request of his own and free of personal expense, was a distinction which no politician could hold lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining with some of his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at six on a Tuesday evening, and travelled without a break until he reached Bristol on the Thursday afternoon, having got over two hundred and seventy miles in forty-four hours. Not only did he execute the journey without a break, but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an ex- ulting commemoration of his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he did not sleep for an instant in the interval. The poll was kept open for a month, and the contest was the most tedious that had ever been known in the city. New freemen were admitted down to the very last day of the election. At the end of it, Burke was second on the poll, and was declared to be duly chosen (November 3, 1774). There was a petition against his return, but the election was confirmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for six years. The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man's weaker places. Burke stood the test. He shov\ed none of the petulant rage of those clamorous politicians whose flight, as he said, is winged in a lower region of the air. As the traveller stands on the noble bridge that now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's local comparison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is ex- hausted of its tide. He gave his new friends a more important lesson, when the time came for him to tliank them for the honour which they had just conferred upon him. His colleague had opened the subject of the relations between a member of Parlia- ment and his constituents ; and had declared that, for his own part, he should regard the instructions of the people of Bristol as decisive and binding. Burke in a weighty passage upheld a man- lier doctrine. " Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication "\\ith his c(jnstituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him ; their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs ; and above all, ever, and \\\ al/ cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment ; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. " [\Iy worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If thai be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, you.-s, without question, (jught to be superior. But govern* 52 - URKE. ment and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of in- clination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination pre* cedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hun- dred miles distant from those who hear the arguments? . . . Authori- tative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest convictions of his judgment and conscience — these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a founda- mental mistake of the whole order and tenour of our Constitution."* For six years the British electors were content to be rep- resented by a man of this independence. They never, however, really acquiesced in the principle that a member of Parliament owes as much to his own convictions as to the will of his con- stituents. In 1778 a bill was brought into Parliament, relaxing some of the restrictions imposed upon Ireland by the atrocious fiscal policy of Great Britain. The great mercantile centres raised a furious outcry, and Bristol was as blind and as boisterous as Manchester and Glasgow. Burke not only spoke and voted in favour of the commercial propositions, but urged that the proposed removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not go nearly far enough. There was none of that too familiar casuistry, by which public men argue themselves out of their conscience in a strange syllogism, that they can best serve the country in Parliament ; that to keep their seats they must follow their electors ; and that there- fore, in the long run, they serve the country best by acquiescing in ignorance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. It needs valour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong to which our best friends are most ardently committed. It warms our hearts to think of the noble courage with which Burke faced the blind and vile selfishness of his own supporters. He reminded them that England only consented to leave to the Irish, in two or three instances, the use of the natural faculties which God had given them. He asked them whether Ireland was united to Great Brit- ain for no other purpose than that we should counteract the bounty of Providence in her favour; and whether, in proportion as that bounty had been liberal, we were to regard it as an evil to be met with every possible corrective ? In our day there is nobody of any school who doubts that Burke's view of our trade policy to- wards Ireland was accurately, absolutely, and magnificently right. I need not repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the Bristol merchants. Burke boldly told them that he would rather run the risk of displeasing than of injuring them. They implored him to become their advocate. '' I should only disgrace myself." he said, "I should lose the only thing which can make such abili- ties as mine of any use to the world now or hereafter. I mean that authority which is derived from the opinion that a member speaks the language of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready * speech at tfie conclusion of the Poll. to take up or lay clown a great political system for the convenience of the hour; that he is in Parliament to support his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opinion in order to get into Parliament or to continue in it." * A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more dis- tasteful to the electors of Bristol, than a small instalment of toler- ation to Roman Catholics in England. A measure was passed (1778) repealing certain iniquitous penalties created by an act of William the Third. It is needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice and sense was supported by Burke. His voters began to believe that those vvere right who had said that he had been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Pnpist at heart, and a Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, sununa dies ei iiicliictabile fa- tiim, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissal from the only independent constituency that lie ever represented. Years before he had warned a young man entering public life to regard and wish well to the common people, whom Iris best instincts and his highest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes an honest public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against the pas- sions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than passions and prejudices of our own. The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol saw this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. They were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been made scapegoats for sins which were not exclu- sively their own. They were only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the entire community. Burke discloses in many places, that for once the King and Parliament did not act without the sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he Avas rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the support of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. " It is but too true," he said in a passage worth remembering, " that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel them- selves in a state of thraldom ; they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all ; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his sliare of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his gen- erosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America ; 02ir col- onies • our dependents. This lust of party power is the liberty * I'lvo tetters to gentlemen in Bristol, 1778 54 BURKE. they hunger and thirst for-, and this Siren song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have thought were never organised to that sort of music." This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, and it was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic ap- preciation of the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mother country as well. Burke had a vehement correspondent who wrote to him (1777) that if the utter ruin of this country were to be the consequence of her persisting in the claim to tax America, then he would be tlie first to say. Let her perish ! If England pre- vails, said Horace VValpole, English and American liberty is at end ; if one fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, "cer- tainly never could and never did wish," as he says of himself, " the colonists to be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded that if such should be the event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great body of standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly of opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englislimen, in' a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the "end to the liberties of England itself." * The way for this remote peril was being sedulously prepared by a widespread deteri- oiation among popular ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they had previously gained in the public mind. In order to prove that the Americans had no right to their liberties, we were every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself. The material stt^ength of the Government, and its moral strength alike, would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists, to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even jeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too. As events actually fell out, the ferocious administration of the law in the last five or six years of the eighteenth century, was the retribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of the English community had watched the measures of the government against their fellow- Englishmen in America. It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely through the successive stages of parliamentary action in the American war. He always defended the settlement of 1766; the Stamp Act was repealed, and the constitutional supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother country was preserved in a Declaratory .Act. When the project of taxing the colonies was revived, and relations with them were becoming strained and dangerous, Burke came forward with a plan for leaving the General Assemblies of the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead of giving and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid in the colonies. Needless to say Appeal from the New to the old WhigS' BrA-A:r 5j that it was rejected, and perhaps it was not feasible. Henceforth I^iirke could only watch in impotence the blunders of government, .and the disasters that befell the national arms. But' his protests a.^ainst the war will last as long as our literature. Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqualified and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentous struggle : the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); the Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (r777). Together they hardly ex- ceed the compass of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether for knovvledsje or for practice. They are an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political sit- uations should strive by night and by day to possess. If the sub- ject v/ith which they deal were less near than it is to our interests and affections as free citizens, these three performances would still abound in the lessons of an incomparable political method. If their .subject were as remote as the quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a con- flict to which the world owes the opportunity of the most important of political experiments, we should still have everything to learn from the author's treatment : the vigorous grasp of masses of com- pressed detail, the wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great po- litical ends of Justice and Freedom, the large and generous inter- pretation of expediency, the iriorality, the vision, the noble temper. If ever, in the fulness of time— and surely the fates of men and literature cannot have it otherwise— Burke becomes one of the half-dozen names of established and universal currency in education and in common books, rising above the waywardness of literary ca- price or intellectual fashions, as Shakespere and Wilton and Bacon rise above it. it will be the mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining discourses in which the world will in an especial degree recognise the combination of sovereign gifts with beneficent uses. The pamphlet on the Present Discontents is partially obscured or muffled to the modern reader by the space which is g'iven to the cabal of the day. The Reflections on the French Revolution over- abounds in declamation, and — apart from its being passionately on one side, and that perhaps the wrong one— the splendour of the eloquence is out of proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the pieces on the American War, on the contrary, Burke was conscious that he could trust nothing to the sympathy or the pre- possessions of his readers, and this put him upon an unwonted per- suasiveness. Here it is reason and judgment, not declamation ; lucidity, not passion ; that produces the effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page ; no purple patch distracts our minds from the penetrating force of the argument ; no commonplace is dressed 56 BURKE. up into a va^iie sublimity- The cause of freedom is made to wea< its own proper robe of equity, self-control, and reasonableness. Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place whose worship and service has cost the race so dear, are discov- ered and shown to be the foolish uncouth stocks and stones that they are. Fox once urged members of parliament to peruse the .•■jjeech on Concihation again and again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson which he thought to be contained in it, that representa- tion is the sovereign remedy for every evil. This is by far the least important of its lessons. It is great in many ways. It is greatest as a remonstrance and an answer against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national pride, the eternal fallacies of war and conquest ; and here it is great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because they expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults of heart and temper, as well as of understanding, which move nations to haughty and violent courses. The great argument with those of the war party who pretended to a political defence of their position was the doctrine that the English government was sovereign in the colonies as at home ; and in the notion of sovereignty they found inherent the notion of an indefeasible right to impose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of the existence of this sovereignty and of the right which they took to be its natural property, "they saw no step be- tween the existence of an abstract right and the propriety of en- forcing it. We have seen an instance of a similar mode of politi- cal thinking in our own lifetime. During the great cival war between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union, people in England convinced themselves — some after careful examination of documents, others by cursory glances at second hand authorities — that the South had a right to secede. The current of opinion was precisely similar in the struggle to v.'hich the United States owed their separate existence. Now the klea of a right as a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be wor- shipped in a state of naked divorce from expediency and con- venience, was one that Burke's political judgment found preposter- ous and unendurable. He hated the arbitrary and despotic savour which clung about the English assumptions over the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when he found that these assumptions were justified, not by some permanent advantage which their victory would procure for the mother country or for the colonies, or which would repay the cost of gaining such a victory ; not by the assertion and demonstration of some positive duty, but by the futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do something or other, if we liked. The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied in a withdrawal of the just claim of the government, instead of convinc- ing, only exasperated him. " Show the thing you contend for to be reason ; show it to be common-sense ; show' it to be the means of attaining some useful end; and then I am content to allow it BURKE. 57 \vliat dignity you please." * The next year lie took up tlie ground still more firmly, and explained it still more impressively. As for the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, " It is less than nothing in my consideration. . . . My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question. I do not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of Government. . . . The question with me is not whether yon have a right to render yoiir people miserable, bnt whether it is not yoicr interest to make them hapPy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I oiight to do. I am not determining a point of law ; I am restoring tranquillity, and the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fitted for them." " 1 am not here going into tlie distinctions of rights," he cries, "not attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinc- tions, I kite the very sonnd of them. This is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man : does it suit his nature in general.-* does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?" He could not bear to think of having legislative or political arrangements shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometri- cal accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to " the natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, generally fall into their proper order." Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests, and not on meta- physical speculations, Burke sows, as he marches along in his stately argument, many a germ of the modern philosophy of civil- isation. He was told that America was worth fighting lor. "Cer- tainly it is," he answered, " if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them." Every step that has been taken in the direction of progress, not merely in empire, but in education, in punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shown the deep wisdom, so un- familiar in that age of ferocious penalties and brutal methods, of this truth — that "the natural effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, good-will, order and esteem in the governed." Is there a single instance to the contrary .? Then there is that sure key to wise politics : " Nobody shall persnade me, when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of concilia- tion.'" And that still more famous sentence, '^ I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. Good and observant men will feel that no misty benevolence or vague sympathy, but the positive reality of experience, inspired such passages as that where he says, " Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites ? What then .? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world, because * Sj>eec It on American Taxation. 58 BURKE. of the mixture of evil that is in it! . . . Those who raise suspi- cious of the good, on account of the behaviour of evil men, are of the party of the latter. ... A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment, than condemn his species. He that ac- cuses all mankind of corruption, ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one. In truth, I should much rather admit those whom at any time 1 have disrelished the most, to be patterns of per- fection, than seek a consolation to my own unworthiness in a general communion of depravity with all about me." This is one of those pieces of rational constancy and mental wholeness in Burke, which fill up our admiration for him — one of the manifold illustrations of an invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation of things, even when they seemed most hostile to all that was dear to his own personality. BURKE. 59 CHAPTER V. ECONOMICAL REFORM— BURKE IN OFFICE— FALL OF HIS PARTY. Towards 1780 it began to be clear that the ministers had brought the country into disaster and humiliation, from which their policy contained no way of escape. In the closing months of the American war, the Opposition pressed ministers with a vigour that never abated. Lord North bore their attacks with perfect good- humour. When Burke, in the course of a great oration, parodied Burgoyne's invitation to the Indians to repair to the King's stan- dard, the wit and satire of it almost suffocated the prime minister, not with shame but with laughter. His heart had long ceased to be in the matter, and everybody knew that he only retained his post in obedience to the urgent importunities of the King, whilst such col- leagues as Rigby only clung to their place because the salaries were endeared by long familiarity. The general gloom was accidentally deepened by that hideous outbreak of fanaticism and violence, which is known as the Lord George Gordon Riots (June, 1780). The Whigs, as having favoured the relaxation of the laws against popery, were especiaTly obnoxious to the mob. The government sent a guard of soldiers to protect Burke's house in Charles Street, St. James's ; but, after he had removed the more important of his papers, he insisted on the guard being dispatched for the protec- tion of more important places, and he took shelter under the roof of General Burgoyne. His excellent wife, according to a letter of his brother, had " the firmness and sweetness of an angel ; but why do I say of an angel ? — of a woman." Burke himself coui- ageously walked to and'fro amid the raging crowds with firm com- posure, though the experiment was full of peril. He describes the mob as being made up, as London mobs generally are, rather of the unruly and dissolute than of fanatical malignants, and he vehe- mently opposed any concessions by Parliament to the spirit of in- tolerance which had first kindled the blaze. All the letters of the time show that the outrages and alarms of those days and nights, in which the capital seemed to be at the mercy of a furious rabble, made a deeper impression on the minds of contemporaries than they ought to have done. Burke was not likely to be less excited than others by the sight of such insensate disorder ; and it is no idle fancy that he lad the mobs of 1780 still in his memory, when ten years later he poured out the vials of his wrath on the bloodier 6o BURKE. mob which carried the King and Queen of France in wild triumph from Versailles to Paris. In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved one of the greatest of all his parliamentary and oratorical successes. Though the matter of this particular enterprise is no longer alive, yet it illustrates his many strong qualities in so remarkable a way that it is right to give some account of it. We have already seen that Burke steadily set his face against parliamentary reform ; he habitually declared that the machine was well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound. The statesman who resists all projects for the reform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how deplorably imperfect are the practical results of its working, binds himself to vigorous exertions for the amend- ment of administration. Burke devoted himself to this duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often been exampled, and has never been surpassed. He went to work with the zeal of a religious en- thusiast, intent on purging his church and his faith of the corruptions which lowered it in the eyes of men. There was no part or order of government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as to escape his acute and persevering observation. Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, was less to husband the public resources and relieve the tax-payer — though this aim could not have been absent from his mind, over- burdened as England then was with the charges of the American war — than to cut off the channels which supplied the corruption of the House of Commons. The full title of the first project which he presented to the legislature (February, 1780), was A Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil and other Establishments. It was to the former that he deemed the latter to be the most di- rect road. The strength of the administration in the House was due to the gifts which the Minister had in his hands to dispense. Men voted with the side which could reward their fidelity. It was the numl^er of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which, along with the controllable influence of peers and nabobs, fur- nished the Minister with an irresistible lever : the avarice and the degraded public spirit of the recipients supplied the required ful- crum. Burke knew that in sweeping away these factitious places and secret pensions, he would be robbing the Court of its chief im- plements of corruption, and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country. He conceived that he would thus be promoting a far more infallible means than any scheme of electoral reform could have provided, for reviving the integrity and independence of the House of Commons. In his eyes, the evil resided not in the constituencies, but in their rep- resentatives ; not in the small number of the one, but in the smaller integrity of the other. The evil did not vStop where it began. It was not merely ihat the sinister motive, thus engendered in the minds of too lax and facile men, induced them to betray their legislative trust, and bar* BURKE. 6, ter their own upriglitness and the interests of the State. The ac quisition of one of these nefarious bribes meant much more than a sinister vote. It called into existejice a champion of every invet- erate abuse that weighed on the resources of the country. There is a well-known passage in the speech on Economical Reform, in which the speaker shows what an insurmountable obstacle Lord Talbot had found in his attempt to carry out certain reforms in the royal household, in the fact that the turnspit of the King's kitchen was a member of Parliament. " On that rock his whole" adventure split — his whole scheme of economy was dashed to pieces ; his de- partment became more expensive than ever; the Civil List debt accumulated." Interference with the expenses of the household meant interference with the perquisites or fees of this legislative turnspit, and the rights of sinecures were too sacred to be touched. In comparison with them, it counted for nothing that the King's tradesmen went unpaid, and became bankrupt; that the judges were unpaid; that "the justice of the kingdom bent ancl gave way ; the foreign ministers remained inactive and unprovided ; the system of Europe was dissolved ; the chain of our alliances was broken ; all the wheels of Government at home and abroad were stopped. The king's turnspit was a inejnber of Parlia- ment.^''* This office, and numbers of others exactly like it, ex- isted solely because the House of Commons w-as crowded with venal men. The post of royal scullion meant a vote that could be relied upon under every circumstance and in all emergencies. And each incumbent of such an office felt his honour and interests concerned in the defence of all other offices of the same scanda- lous description. There was thus maintained a strong standing army of expensive, lax, and corrupting officials. The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobbery and purposeless j^rofusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation had "shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another office of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole. For these three useless offices there were three useless treasurers. They all laid a heavy burden on the tax-payer, in order to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament. The plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries. " Take away," was Burke's demand, "the whole establishment of detail in the household: the Treas- urer, the Comptroller, the Cofferer of the Household, the Treas- urers of the Chamber, the Master of Household, the whole Board of Green Cloth ; a vast number of subordinate offices in the de- partment of the Steward of the Household ; the whole establish' * Tlie Civil List at this time comprehended a great number of charges, such as those of wliich Rurke speaks, that had nothing to do with the sovereign personally. They Were slovvlv removed, the judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the acces* tion of VVilliam VI. 62 BURKE. ment of the Great Wardrobe ; the Removing Wardrobe ; the Jewel Office ; the Robes ; the Board of Works." The aboh'tion of this confused and costly system would not only diminish expense and promote efficiency; it would do still more excellent service in de- stroying the roots of parliamentary corruption. " Under other governments a question of expense is only a question of economy, and it is nothing more ; with us, in every question of expense, there is always a mixture of constitutional considerations." Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any means the only stumbling-block in the way of pure and well-ordered gov- ernment. The administration of the estates of the Crown — the Principality, the Duchy of Cornwall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatine of Chester — was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitable expenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, while no more than twelve sufficed to perform the whole business of justice in England, a country ten times as large, and a hundred times as opulent. Wales, and each of the duchies, had its own exchequer. Every one of these principalities, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for the jurisdiction over a few private estates ; it has the formality and charge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collecting the rents of a country squire. They were the field, in his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic revenues, of difficult trifles and laborious fooleries. " It was but the other day that that pert factious fellow, the Duke of Lancaster, presumed to fly in the face of his hege lord, our gi-acious sovereign • — presumed to go to law with the King. The object is neither your business nor mine. Which of the parties got the better I really forget. The material point is that the suit cost about 15,000/. But as the Duke of Lancaster is but agent of Duke Humphrey, and not worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs of both," The system which involved these costly absurdities, Burke proposed entirely to abolish. In the same spirit he wished to dispose of the Crown lands and the forest lands, which it was for the good of the community, not less than of the Crown itself, to throw into the hands of private owners. One of the most important of these projected reforms, and one which its author did not flinch from carrying out two years later to his own loss, related to the office of Paymaster. This functionary was accustomed to hold large balances of the i^ublic money in his own hands and for his own profit, for long periods, owing to a com- plex system of accounts wliich was so rigorous as entirely to defeat its own object. The Paymaster could not, through the multiplicity of forms and the exaction of impossible conditions, get a prompt acquittance. The audit sometimes did not take place for years after the accounts were virtually closed. Meanwhile, the money accumulated in his hands, and its profits were his legitimate per- quisite. The first Lord Holland, for example, held the balances of his office from 1765. when he retired, until 1778, when they were audited. During this time he realised, as the interest on the use o{ these balances, nearly two hundred &nd fifty thousand pounds. BURKE. 63 liuike diverted these enormous gains into the coffers of the state. He lixed the Paymaster's salary at four thousand pounds a year, and was himself the first person who accepted the curtailed in- come. Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke's pieces, yet the Speech on Economical Reform is certainly not the least instructive or im- pressive of them. It gives a suggestive view of the relations exist- ing at that time between the House of Commons and the Court. It reveals the narrow and unpatriotic sprit of tiie King and the ministers, who could resist proposals so leasonable in themselves, and so remedial in their effects, at a time when the nation was suffering the heavy and distressing burdens of the most disastrous war that our country has ever carried on. It is especially interest- ing as an illustration of its author's political capacity. At a mo- ment when committees, and petitions, and great county meetings showed how thoroughly the national anger was roused against the existing system, Burke came to the front of affairs with a scheme, of which the most striking characteristic proved to be that it was profoundly temperate. Bent on the extirpation of the system, he had no ill-will towards the men who had happened to flourish m it. " I never will suffer," he said, "any man or description of men to suffer from errors that naturally have grown out of the abusive constitution of those offices which I propose to regulate. If I can- not reform with equity, I will not reform at all." Exasperated as he was by the fruitlessness of his opposition to a policy which he detested from the bottom of his soul, it would have been little won- derful if he had resorted to every weapon of his unrivalled rhetori- ical armoury, in order to discredit and overthrow the whole scheme of government. Yet nothing could have been further from his mind than any violent or extreme idea of this sort. Many years afterwards he took credit to himself less for what he did on this occasion, than for what he prevented from being done. People were ready for a new modelling of the two Houses of Parliament, as well as for grave modifications of the Prerogative. Burke re- sisted this temper unflinchingly. "I had," he says, "a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, b-.it not to inflame or to mislead." He then recounts without ex- aggeration the pains and caution with v;hich he sought reform, while steering clear of innovation. He heaved the lead every inch of way he made. It is grievous to think that a man who could assume such an attitude at such a time, who could give this kind of proof of this skill in the great, the difficult, art of governing, only held a fifth-rate office for some time less than a twelvemonth. The year of the project of Economic Reform (1780) is usually taken as the date when Burke's influence and repute were at their height. He had not been tried in the fire of official responsibility, and his impetuosity was still under a degree of control which not long afterwards was fatally weakened by an over-mastering irrita- bility of constitution. High as his character was now in tlie ascend- ant, it was in the same year that Burke suffered the sharp mortifi- 64 BURKE. cation of losing his seat at Bristol. His speech before the election is one of the best known of all his performances ; and it well de- serves to be so, for it is surpassed b}^ none in gravity, elevation, and moral dignity. We can only wonder that a constituency which could suffer itself to be addressed on this high level should have allowed the small selfishness of local interest to weigh against such wisdom and nobility. But Bm-ke soon found in the course of his canvas that he had no chance, and he declined to go to the poll. On the previous day one of his competitors had fallen down dead. " What shadows we are,^ said Burke, "-and what shadows we pursue / " In 1782 Lord North's government came to an end, and the King "was pleased," as Lord North quoted with jesting irony from the Gazette, to send for Lord Rockingham, Charles Fox, and Lord Shelburne. Members could hardly believe their own eyes, as they saw Lord North and the members of a government which had been in place for twelve years, now lounging on the opposition benches in their great-coats, frocks, and boots, while Fox and Burke shone in the full dress that was then worn by ministers, and cut unwonted figures with swords, lace, and hair powder. Sheridan was made an under-secretary of state, and to the younger Pitt was offered his choice of various minor posts, which he haughtily refused. Burke, to whom on their own admission the party owed everything, was appointed Paymaster of the Forces, with a salary of four thousand pounds a year. His brother, Richard Burke, was made Secretary of the Treasury. His son, Richard, was named to be his father's deputy at the Pay Office, with a salary of five hundred pounds a year. This singular exclusion from cabinet office of the most powerful genius of the party has naturally given rise to abundant criticism ever since. It will be convenient to say what there is to be said on this subject, in connection with the'events of 17S8 (below, p 88), because there happens to exist some useful information about the ministerial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon the arrangements of six years before. Meanwhile it is enough to say that Burke himself had most reasonably looked to some higher post. There is the distinct note of the humility of mortified pride in a letter written in reply to some one who had applied to him for a place. " You have been misinformed," he says ; " I make no part of the ministerial arrangement. Something in the official line may possibly be thought fit for my measure."' Burke knew that his jDOsition in the country entitled him to something above the official line. In a later year, when he felt himself called upon to defend his pension, he described what his position was in the momentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and Burke's habitual vera- ciousness forbids us to treat the description as in any way exag- gerated. "By what accident it matters not," he say, "nor upon what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy which has ever pursued me with a full cry through life, I had ob- tained a very full degree of public confidence. . . . Nothing BURKE. 65 to prevent disorder was omitted ; when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand— I do not say I saved my country — I am sure I did my coun- try important service. There were few indeed that did not at that time acknowledge it — and that time was thirteen years ago. It was but one view, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision should be made for him." * We have seen that Burke had fixed the Paymaster's salary at four thousand pounds, and had destroyed the extravagant per- quisites. The other economical reforms which were actually effected fell short by a long way of those which Burke had so in- dustriously devised and so forcibly recommended. In 1782, while Burke declined to spare his own office, the chief of the cabinet conferred upon Barre a pension of over three thousand a year; about ten times the amount, as has been said, which, in Lord Rockingham's own judgment, as expressed in the nev/ Bill, ought henceforth to be granted to any one person whatever. This short- coming, however, does not detract from Burke's merit. He was not responsiiile for it. The eloquence, ingenuity, diligence, above all, the sagacity and the justice of this great effort of 1780, are none the less worthy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, his chiefs, partly perhaps out of a newborn deference for the feel- ings of their royal master, showed that the possession of office had sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper to Opposition. The events of the twenty months between the resignation of Lord North (1782) and the accession of Pitt to the office of Prime Minister (December, 1783) mark an important crisis in political history, and they mark an important crisis in Burke's career and hopes. Lord Rockingham had just been three months in office when he died (July, 1782). This dissolved the bond that heid the two sections of the ministry together, and let loose a flood of rival ambitions and sharp animosities. Lord Shelburne believed him- self to have an irresistible claim to the chief post in the adminis- tration ; among other reasons, because he might have had it before Lord Rockingham three months earlier, if he had so chosen. The King supported him, not from any partiality to his person, but because he dreaded and hated Charles Fox. Hie character of Shelburne is one of the perplexities of the time. His views on peace and free trade make him one of the precursors of the Manchester School. No minister was so well informed as to the threads of policy in foreign countries. He was the intimate or the patron of men who now stood cut as among the first lights of that time — of Morellet, of Priestley, of Bentham. Yet a few months of power seem to have disclosed faults of character which left him without a single political friend, and blighted him with irreparable discredit. Fox, who was now the head of the Rockingham section of the Whigs, had, before the death of the late premier, been on the point of refusing to serve * Letter to a Noble Lord. 66 BURKE. any longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly refused to serve under him. When Parliament met after Rockingham's death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke continued, long after the Speaker had taken the chair, to walk backwards and forwards in the Court of Requests, engaged in earnest conversation. According to one story, Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emoluments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift col- league. According to another, and more probable legend, it was Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimulated Fox's jealousy of Shelburne. The Duke of Richmond disapproved of the seces- sion, and remained in the government. Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his personal conviction to loyalty to Fox. If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the government, then he was the instigator of a blunder that must be ]3ronounced not only disastrous but culpable. It lowered the legitimate spirit of partv to the nameless spirit of faction. The dangers from which the old liberties of the realm had just emerged have been described by no one so forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was so convinced as Burke that the only way of withstanding the ar- bitrary and corrupting policy of the Court was to form a strong Whig party. No one knew better than he the sovereign impor- tance and the immense difficulty of repairing the ruin of the last twelve years by a good peace. The Rockingham or Foxite section were obviously unable to form an effective party with serious ex- pectation of power, unless they had allies. They might, no doubt, from personal dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work under him ; but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and violently working against him, when his policy was their own, and when its success was recognised by them no less than by him as of urgent moment. Instead of either working with the other section of their party, or of supporting from below the gangway that which was tfie policy of both sections, they sought to return to power by coalescing with the very man whose criminal subser- vience to the King's will had brought about the catastrophe that Shelburne was repairing. Burke must share the blame of this famous transaction. He was one of the most furious assailants of the new ministry. He poured out a fresli invective against Lord Shelburne every day. Cynical contemporaries laughed as they saw him in search of more and more humiliating parallels, ran- sacking all literature from the Bible and the Roman history down to Mother Goose's tales. His passion carried him so far as to breed a reaction in those who listened to him. " I think," wrote Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit to Lord Fitz- william in the autumn of 1782. " that Burke's mad obloquy against Lord Shelburne, and these insolent pamphlets in which he must have had a hand, wHI do more to fix him (Shelburne) in his office than anything else." This result would have actually followed, for the nation was ill pleased at the immoral alliance between the Foxites and the man whom, if they had been true to their opinions a thousand timei BURKE. 67 repeated, they ought at that moment to have been impeaching. The Dissenters, who had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are rigid above other men in their demand of political con- sistency, lamented Burke's fall in joining the Coalition, as Priestley told him many years after, as the fall of a friend and a brother. But Shelburne threw away the game. " His falsehoods," says Horace Walpole, " his flatteries, duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, contradictions, neglect of his friends, with all the kindred of all these faults, were the daily topics of contempt and ridicule ; and his folly shut his eyes, nor did he perceive that so very rapid a fall must have been owing to his own incapacity." This is the testi- mony of a hostile witness. It is borne out, however, by a circum- stance of striking significance. When the King recovered the reins at the end of 1783, not only did he send for Pitt instead of for Shelburne, but Pitt himself neither invited Shelburne to join him, nor in any way ever consulted him then or afterwards, though he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne's own administration. Whatever the causes may have been, the administration fell in the spring of 1783. It was succeeded by the memorable ministry of the Coalition, in which Fox and Lord North divided the real power under the nominal lead of the Duke of Portland. Members saw Lord North squeezed up on the Treasury bench between two men who had a year before been daily menacing him with the axe and the block ; and it was not North whom they blamed, but Burke and Fox. Burke had returned to the Pay Office. His first act there was unfortunate. He restored to their position two clerks who had been suspended for malversation, and against whom proceedings were then pending. When attacked for this in the House, he showed an irritation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down into his seat by the tails of his coat. The restoration of the clerks was an indefensi- ble error of judgment, and its indiscretion was heightened by the kind of defence which Burke tried to set up. When we wonder at Burke's exclusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bembridge should not be forgotten. The decisive event in the history of the Coahtion Government was the India Bill. The Reports of the various select committees upon Indian affairs — the most important of them all, the ninth and eleventh, having been drawn up by Burke himself — had shown conclusively that the existing system of government was thoroughly corrupt and thoroughly inadequate. It is ascertained pretty con- clusively that the bill for replacing that system was conceived and drawn by Burke, and that to him belongs whatever merit or demerit it might possess. It was Burke who infected Fox with his own ar- dour, and then, as Moore justly says, the self-kindling power of Fox's eloquence threw such fire into defence of the measure, that he forgot, and his hearers never found out, that his views were not originally and spontaneously his own. The novelty on which the great stress of discussion was laid, was that the bill withdrew power 68 BURKE. from the Board of Directors, and vested the government for four years in a commission of seven persons named in the bill, and not removable by the House. Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the Company, so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, but, as he said, one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever ex- isted in the world, as to be content with nothing short of the absolute deprivation of its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, and that he only contended for good government, from whatever quarter it might come. But the idea of good government coming from the Company he declared to be desperate and untenable. This intense animosity, which, considering his long and close famil- iarity with the infamies of the rule of the Company's servants, was not unnatural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded him to the grave objections which really existed to his scheme. In the first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent with the spirit of his revered Constitution. For the legislature to assume the power of naming the members of an executive body, was an extraordinary and mischievous innovation. Then, to put patronage, which has been estimated by a sober authority at about three hundred thou- sand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Commons, was still more mischievous and still less justifiable. Worst of all, from the point of view of the projectors themselves, after a certain time the nomination of the Commissioners would fall to the Crown, and this might in certain contingencies increase to a most danger- ous extent the ascendancy of the royal authority. If Burke's measure had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have been transferred to a body much less competent than the Directors to judge of the quahties required in the fulfilment of this or that administrative charge. Indian promotion would have followed par- liamentary and party interest. In the hands of the Directors there was at least a partial security, in their professional knowledge, and their personal interest in the success of their government, that places would not be given away on irrelevant considerations. Their system, with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain considerable competency in administration, before a servant reached an elevation at which he could do much harm". Burke defended the bill (December i, 1783) in one of the speeches which rank only below his greatest, and it contains two or three passages of unsurpassed energy and impressiveness. Everybody knows the fine page about Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. of France, and the happy quotation from SiHus Italicus. Every book of British eloquence contains the magnificent de- scription of the young magistrates who undertake the government and the spoliation of India ; how, "animated with all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after an- other, wave after wave ; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and of passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting." How they return home BURKE. 6^ laden with spoil; " their prey is lodged in England ; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean." How in India all the vices operate by which sudden fortune is ac- quired ; while in England are often displayed by the same person the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth so that " here the man- ufacturer and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppression and his oppressors." No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair faults alike in structure and in tactics. The whole design was a master- piece of hardihood, miscalculation, and mismanagement. The com- bination of interests against the bill was instant, and it was in- deed formidable. The great army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors of East India stock, rose up in all its immense force. Every member of every corporation that enjoyed privilege by charter felt the attack on the Companv as if it had been a blow directed against himself. The general public had no particular passion for purity or good government, and the best portion of the pul3lic wasdisgusted with the Coalition. The King saw his chance. With politic audacity he put so strong a personal pressure on the peers, that they threw out the Bill(December, 1783). It was to no purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of a Turk- ish Sultan, and the King's letter to Temple to the rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to be destroyed. Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt was installed in their place, and the Whigs were ruined. As a partv, thev had a few months of office after Pitt's death, but they were excluded from power for half a century, JO BURKE. CHAPTER VI. BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS. Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitely abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close inti- macy with the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, as no other literary group in our history lives. Goldsmith's famous lines in Retaliation show how they all deplored that he should to party give up what was meant for mankind. They often told one another that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent. Every- body felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowl- edge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was there, and of all the names of the time he is the man whom one would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, and Ger- mans like Lich ten berg, into amazement and ecstasy, are exactly those gifts which literary description can do least to reproduce. Burke was one of his strongest admirers, and there was no more zealous attendant at the closing series of performances in which the great monarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the last pages that he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear friend Garrick, dead nearly twenty years before, as the first of actors, because he was the acutest observer of nature that he had ever known. Among men who pass for being more serious than players, Robertson was often in London society, and he attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth. He sent a copy of his history of America, and Burke thanked him with many stately compliments for having employed philosophy to judge of manners, and from man- ners having drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely expressed by Mackin- tosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. Though Burke and Gibbon con- stantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution, there was much intimacy between tliem, in spite of the respect v/hich each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. When the Decline and Fall \\2l^ published, Burke read it as every- body else did ; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as PURKE. ^T very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither a man of letters nor a keen politician ; but he was full of lit- erary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant friends, following him with an admiration and rever ence that even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The reader of Reynolds's famous Discourses will probably share the wondei of his contemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in the practice of his art should have proved himself so excellent a master in the expression of some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited with a large share in their composition, but the evidence goes no further than that Reynolds used to talk them over with him. The friendship between the pair was full and un- alloyed. What Burke admired in the great artist was his sense and' his morals, no less than his genius ; and to a man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentleness, evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described it, of being the same all the year round. When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointed Burke one of his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousand pounds, besides cancelling a bond of the same amount. Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious com- pany who can profitably be compared with Burke in -strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best idea.s" of a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinder the inevitable transformation. One of them did not even dimly foresee it. But both of them help us to under- stand how manliness and reverence, strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man, all flourished under old institutions and old ways of thinking, into which the forces of the time were even then silently breathing a new spirit. The friendship between Burke and Johnson lasted as long as they lived ; and if we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, and declared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually talked about cursed Whigs, and bot- tomless Whigs, it is an extraordinary fact that his relations with the greatest Whig writer and politician of his day were marked by a cordiality, respect, and admiration that never varied nor wavered. " Burke," he said in a well known passage, '• is such a man that if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that, when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man. He is never what we would call humdrum : never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was as good a listener as he was a talker, Johnson never would allow. " So desirous is he to talk," he said, " that if one is talking at this end of the table, he'll talk to somebody at the other end." Johnson was far too good a critic, and too honest a man, to assent to a remark of 72 BURKE. Robertson's, that Burke had wit. " No, sir," said the sage, most truly, "he never succeeds there. 'Tis low, 'tis conceit." Wit apart, he described Burke as the only man whose common conver- sation corresponded to his general fame in the world ; take up whatever topic you might please, he was ready to meet you. When Burke found a seat in Parliament, Johnson said, " Now we who know Burke, know that he will be one of the first men in the coun- try." He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in the House of Commons, for Burke, he said, was always the first man everywhere. Once when he was ill, somebody mentioned Burke's name; Johnson cried out, " That fellow calls forth all my powers ; were I to see Burke now it would kill me." Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When some flatterer hinted that Johnson had taken more than his right share of the evening's talk, Burke said, " Nay, it is enough for me to have rung the bell for him." Some one else spoke of a successful imitation of Johnson's style. Burke with vehemence denied the success : the performance, he said, hid the pomp, but not the force of the original; the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength ; the contortions of the sibyl, but none of the inspiration. When Burke showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens at Beaconsfield, Non invidco egiude??t, Johnson said, with placid good-will, ?niror inagis. They always parted in the deep» and pregnant phrase of a sage of our own day, except in opinioti not disagreeing. In truth, the explanation of the sympathy be- ween them is not far to seek. We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to the essentially conservative spii'it of Burke even in his most Whiggish days. And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who called out with loud indignation that the Irish vvere in a most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed Dver the majority and the severity of the persecution exercised by :hc Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics, exceeded that of 'he ten historic perse.cutions of. the Christian Church. The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the Turk's tJead in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach's country house at Grandval. When we think of the reckless themes that were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burke would have found their own differences too minute to be worth considering. If the group from the Turk's Head could have been transported for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have been the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had the capacity of the more genial sort of casuist for playing with subjects, even moral subjects, with the freedom, versatility, and ease that are proper to literature, Burke, on the contrary, would not have failed to see, as indeed we know that he did not fail to see, that a social pandemonium was being prepared in this intellectual paradise of open questions, where God and a future life, marriage and the family, every dogma of BURKE. 73 reHp:ion, every prescription of morality, and all those mysteries and pieties of human life which have been sanctified by the reverence of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces, as if they had been toys in the hands of a company of sportive children. Even i\\Q Beggar's C/ excuse which 15urke liad not, for the principle of persecution wa , accepted by the best minds of the six- teenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it was emphatically repudiated. Another illustrious name of Ikirke's own era rises to our ■ as we ponder mentally the too scanty list of those who liave^rsaved the '^reat and hardy task of reconciling crder with pr'UB^^^gg Y'ur- got is even a more 'imposing figure than 13urke hi^^^jf^ j)^g j,^. pression made upon us i)y the nair^.R^eecS^t?!^' different, for Tur- gotwas austere, reserved^j^tant, a man of many silences, and much suS4M:. 50 cts. a Year ; 5 cts. a No. As for seven years past, this exquisite magaz ne for the nursery is still unri- valled in its monthly merry-making for the wee folks. Large pages, large pictures, large type. • . ' OUR LITTLE MEN AND WOMEN. $100 a Year ,10 cts. a ;n'o. For the youngest readers no magazine approaches this in number and beauty of illustrations (each volume containing 75 full-page picture.s) and in the peculiar fitness of the accompanying text. THE I? A IV S 1^ . 75 cts. a Year ; 7 cts. a No. For both week-day and Sunday reading, Th5 Pansy holds the first place in the hearts of the children, and in the approval of earnest-minded parents. Agents loanted. Liberal pay. Send for specimen copies. Address D, LO Timor <£• CO,, Publishers, Boston, LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 185. .87. 188. 189. 192. 193- 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. Mysterious Island, Pt II. 15 Mysterious Islaiid.Ptl II. 15 Tom Brown at Oxford, 2 Parts, each 15 Thicker than Water 20 In Silk Attire 20 Scottish Chiefs, Part I.. 20 Scottish Chiefs, Part 1 1. 20 .90. Willy Reilly 20 191. The Nautz Family 20 Great Expectations 20 Hist. of Pendennis,Pt I.. 20 Hist. of Pendennis,Pt II 20 Widow Bedott Papers ..20 Daniel Deronda,Part I . .20 Daniel Deronda, Part II. 20 Altiora Peto 20 By the Gate of the Sea.. 15 Tales of a Traveller 20 Life and Voyages of Co- lumbus, 2 Parts, each. 20 200. The Pilgrim's Progress.. 20 201. MartinChuzzlewit,P'rt 1. 20 MartinChuzzlewit,P't 1 1. 20 202. Theophrastus Such 10 203. Disarmed 15 204. Eugene Aram 20 205. The Spanish Gypsy, &c. 20 206. Cast up by the Sea 20 207. Mill on the Floss, Part T.15 Mill on the Floss, P't II. 15 208. Brother Jacob, etc 10 209. The Executor 20 210. American Notes 15 211. The Newcomes, Part I.. 20 The Newcomes, Part II. 20 212. The Privateersman 20 The Three Feathers.. ..20 Phantom Fortune 20 The Red Eric 20 216. Lady Silverdale's Sweet- heart 10 217. The Four Macnicol's. ..10 2i8.Mr.PisistratusBrown,M.P.io 219. Dombeyand Son, Part 1. 20 Dombeyand Son,Part II.20 220. Book of Snobs 10 22 1 . Fairy Tales, Illustrated . . 20 The Disowned 20 Little Dorrit, Part 1 20 Little Dorrit, Part II ... .20 224. Abbotsford and New- stead Abbey lo 225. Oliver Goldsmith, Black 10 226. The Fire Brigade 20 227. Rifle and Hound in Cey- lon 20 228. Our Mutual Friend, P't 1. 20 OurMutualFriend,P't II.20 Paris Sketches 15 Belinda 20 Nicholas Nickleby.P't 1. 20 NicholasNickleby.P't II.20 Monarch of Mincing Lane 20 Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon 20 234' Pictures from Italy 15 235- Adventures of Philip, Pt 1. 15 Adventures of Philip, Pt II.15 836. Knickerbocker History oi New York ,30 I 2'3- 214. 215- 222. 223. 229. 230. 231. 232. «33. 237. The Boy at Mugby 10 238. The Virginians, Part I.. 20 The Virginians, Part 1 1. 20 239. Eriing the Bold 20 240. KeneTm Chillingly 20 241. Deep Down 20 242. Samuel Brohl & Co 20 243. Gautran 20 244. Bleak House, Part I 20 Bleak House, Part 1 1... 20 245. What Will He Do With It ? 2 Parts, each 20 246. Sketches ofYoungCouples. 10 247. Devereux 20 248. Life of Webster, Part 1. 15 Life of Webster, Pt. II. 15 249. The Crayon Papers 20 250. The Caxtons, Part I 15 The Caxtons, Part II ... 15 251. Autobiography of An- thony Trollope 20 252. Critical Reviews, etc. ... 10 253. Lucretia 20 254. Peter the Whaler 20 255. Last of the Barons. Pt 1.15 Last of the Barons, Pt. 1 1. 15 256. Eastern Sketches 15 257. All in a Garden Fair 20 258. File No. 113 20 259. The Parisians, Part I... 20 The Parisians, Part 1 1.. 20 260. Mrs. Darling's Letters ... 20 261. Master Humphrey's Clock 10 262. Fatal Boots, etc 10 263. The Alhambra 15 264. The Four Georges 10 265. Plutarch's Lives, 5 Pts. $1. 266. Under the Red Flag 10 267. TheHaunted House, etc. 10 268. When the Ship Comes Home ...10 269. One False, both Fair. ...20 270. The Mudfog Papers, etc. ID 271. My Novel, ^ Parts, each.20 272. Conquest of Granada. ..20 273. Sketches by Boz 20 274. A Christmas Carol, etc. 15 275. lone Stewart 20 276. Harold, 2 Parts, each. . . 15 277. Dora Thorne 20 278. Maid of Athens 20 279. Conquest of Spain 10 280. Fitzboodle Papers, etc.. 10 281. Bracebridge Hall 20 282. Uncommercial Traveller.20 283. Roundabout Papers 20 284. Rossmoyne 20 285. A Legend of the Rhine, etc , 10 286. Cox's Diary, etc 10 287. Beyond Pardon 20 288. Somebody'sLuggage,etc.io 289. Godolphin 20 290. Salmagundi 20 291. Famous Funny Fellows. 20 292. Irish Sketches, etc 20 293. The Battle of Life, etc.. . lo 294. Pilgrims of the Rhine. . . 15 295. Random Shots 20 296. Men's Wives 10 397f Mysteiy of £dwm Drood.20 302. 303. 304. 305. 306. 319- 320. 321. 322. 323- 324- 325- 298. Reprinted Pieces 20 299. Astoria ....20 300. Novels by Eminent Handsio 301. Companions of Columbus2o No Thoroughfare 10 Character Sketches, etc. 10 Christmas Books 20 A Tour on the Prairies... 10 Ballads 15 307. Yellowplush Papers 10 308. Life of Mahomet, Part 1. 15 Life of Mahomet, Pt. II. 15 309. Sketchesand Travels in London lo 3 10. Oliver Goldsmith,Irving.2o 3 1 1. Captain Bonneville .... 20 312. Golden Girls 20 3i3« English Humorists 15 314. Moorish Chronicles 10 315. Winifred Power 20 3 16. Great HoggartyDiamond lo 317. Pausanias 15 318. T4ie New Abelard 20 A Real Queen 20 The Rose and the Ring.20 Wolfert's Roost and Mis- cellanies, by Irving.. . • 10 Mark Seaworth 20 Life of Paul Jones 20 Round the World 20 Elbow Room 20 326. The Wizard's Son 25 327. Harry Lorrequer 20 328. Howit AllCameRound.2o 329. Dante Rosetti's Poems. 20 330. The Canon's Ward 20 331. Lucile, by O. Meredith. 20 332. Every Day Cook Book. . 20 333. Lays of Ancient Rome . . 20 334. Life of Burns 20 335. The Young Foresters... 20 336. John Bull andHis Island 20 337. Salt Water, byKmgston. 20 338. The Midshipman 20 339. Proctor's Poems 20 340. Clayton|s Rangers 20 341. .'jchillers Poems .20 342. Goethe's Faust 20 Goethe's Poems 20 Life of Thackeray 10 Dante's Vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.. 20 An Interesting Case 20 Life of Byron, Nichol. ..10 Life of Bunyan 10 Valerie's Fate 10 Grandfather Lickshingle.20 Lays of the Scottish Ca- valiers 20 Willis' Poems 20 353. Tales of the French Re- volution 15 Loom and Lugger ...... 20 More Leaves from a Life in the Highlands 15 Hygiene of the Brain. ..25 357. Berkeley the Banker 20 358. Homes Abroad 15 359. Scott's Lady of the Lake, with notes 20 36o» Modem Christianity a Ctvilized Heathenism. ...le 343. 344. 345- 346. 347- 348. 349- 350- 3S'« 352. 354. 355. 356. HHMHMM^P BHAHT Mm HERVE POO! Vitalized Phos-phites COMPOSED OF THE NERVE-GIVING PRINCIPIiES OF THE OX-BBAIN AND WHEAT-GERM. It restores the energy lost by Nervousness or Indigestion ; rellevet Lassitude and Neuralgia ; refreshes the nerves tired by worry, excite- ment, or excessive brain fatigue ; strengthens a failing memory, and f lives renewed vigor in all diseases of Nervous Exhaustion or Debility^ t is the only PREVENTIVE FOR CONSUMPTION. It aids wonderfully in the mental and bodily growth of infanta and children. Under its use the teeth come easier, the bones grow better, the skin plumper and smoother; the brain acquires m^re readily, and rests and sleeps more stoeetly. An ill-fed brain learns no lessons, and is excusable if peevish It gives a Tiappier and better childhood, **It is with, the utmost confidence that I recommend this excellent pre- paration for the relief of indigestion and for general debility; nay, I do more than recommend, I really urge all invalids to put it to the test, for in sev- eral cases personally known to me signal benefits have been derived from its use. 1 have recently watched its effects on a young friend who has Buffered from indigestion all her life. After taking the Vitalized Phos- phites for a fortnight she said to me; * I feel another person; it is a pleas- ure to live.* Many hard-working men and women — especially those engaged in brain work — would be saved from the fatal resort to chloral and other destructive stimulants, if they would have recourse to a remedy so simple and BO efficacious." EMUiT FUTHFUIJL Physicians hate prescribed oyer COO, 000 Packages because th^t XMOW its Composition, that it is not a bbcrbt rbmedt, AJf» THAT THE FORMULA 13 PRINTED ON EVERT LASBIt For Sale by Drusrsrlsta or by Af all» #Za P. CROSBY CO., 56 West 25th Street. BD'14 7/ *^